Common Council — Community Development Committee
A resident told the Community Development Committee he had found no signed agreement behind the charitable fund the administration said would cover executive salaries — and that when he donated to it under the name of a famous Sabres hoax, the money was returned rather than documented. Thirty-two minutes later a council member said he had been lied to. The item went forward without recommendation.
The Buffalo Transition and Transformation Fund was introduced to the Common Council last December as philanthropy stepping in to help with the city's fiscal squeeze. In April it acquired a specific job: the Mayor's budget letter proposed drawing on it to help cover the police commissioner's salary, by then raised to a quarter of a million dollars. On Monday a resident told the committee he has spent the year trying to establish whether the fund exists in any binding form, and has not managed it.[1]
Mr. Austin laid out a methodical paper trail. “On the first day of the new year I filed a FOIL request looking for the fund agreement. After two months I didn't receive a fund agreement. I was told that it was in draft form.”[1]
Then he tested it from the other end, and this is the part that will travel. He made three donations to the fund — in June, August and September — “in honour of Taro Tsujimoto.” Taro Tsujimoto is not a person. He is the player the Buffalo Sabres invented and announced as a draft pick in 1974, a hoax so well known locally that the name functions as a civic in-joke. Using it was the test: would the fund take an obviously fictitious donor, and would it then say who else had given?[1]
It took the money. When he asked for donor information in August, he says the Community Foundation's chief philanthropy officer told him that providing the documents “would result in a quid pro quo exchange, and I was refunded my donation without any documents.” Under questioning from the Majority Leader he confirmed the sequence: “They accepted it and then like two weeks later they followed up with my email and yeah, they rejected, so they sent it back.”[1]
His point was not about his own money. “Since this was kind of promised to taxpayers as a way of easing the burden, especially the tax increase going up, I just have questions about whether there's a fund agreement. To my knowledge no fund agreement exists, or it's in draft form. So nothing's been signed by the city — and those dollars were promised to the council and the taxpayers.”[1]
What followed was the sharpest thirty minutes any of these four committees produced. Chair Joseph Golombek, who had voted for the salary increases the fund was meant to offset, put it in terms a constituent would understand: “I have to say to them, yeah, I voted for all these pay increases because I was bamboozled.” And on how he intends to operate from here: “I want everything in writing from this point on, because I don't believe anything that I'm told privately… everything that we've been told has, quite honestly, it's been a lie.”[1]
Rasheed Wyatt, pressing the administration's representative: “Don't make me think that I didn't hear what I heard. That's all I'm saying.” Deputy Mayor White's answer drew the line he would not cross: “You are here for the conversation. I was not.”[1]
Zeneta Everhart went to the substance of what charitable money should buy: “I would hope that we would use these amazing donors' money to go to something really, really good instead of paying someone a $200,000 salary.” And Leah Halton-Pope raised a second thread entirely — “All of a sudden I start getting contracts with the city of Buffalo. That has me concerned.”[1]
The committee sent the item to the full Council without recommendation, 9–0. On October 13 the Council received and filed it, 9–0 — which is the disposition that ends a matter rather than advancing it.[2][4]
What this brief cannot tell you is whether a signed fund agreement exists today. Nobody at the table produced one, and nobody said one had been signed. The Community Foundation is not a city agency and did not appear. Austin's account of what its chief philanthropy officer told him is his account; this publication has not seen the correspondence.[3]
Three dispositions did the work on this docket and they are not interchangeable. Recommend approve sends an item to the full Council with the committee behind it. Without recommendation sends it up with the committee expressly declining to endorse it — which is what happened here, and which is a signal rather than a shrug. Received and filed, the Council's eventual action, acknowledges a document and closes the matter: no further step is scheduled, nothing is referred on, nobody is directed to produce anything.[2]
So a resident's year-long attempt to obtain a fund agreement, which produced a committee chair saying on the record that the Council had been lied to, ended two weeks later as a filing. Nothing in the record directs anyone to produce the agreement, and no follow-up date was set.
Two other moments on this docket are worth keeping, because together they describe how members experience the machinery they sit on top of.
Mitchell Nowakowski, on a matter in his own district: “It's just one of those things where I feel powerless.” And Golombek, relaying a conversation with a city employee about process: “Everything is done in triplicate, and she looked at me and she said, but nothing's getting done.” His summary of the year so far was blunter still — watching the administration “step in one cow pie after another since January 1st.”[1]
Dave Zygaj — the resident whose complaint about tree planting at Ralph Wilson Foundation Park the Council referred here on September 29, with before-and-after photographs attached — also appeared. The recording does not render his remarks cleanly enough to quote at length.[1][4]
A reader trying to follow a single issue through this Council should know that several are split across committees, and that on October 6 all of them were tabled in both places.[2]
The Buffalo Youth Council exists as two overlapping vehicles: a local law in Legislation that would replace the Committee for Youth with an elected Youth Council and a Youth Commission, and an initiative item here in Community Development. Both tabled.
A menthol and flavoured tobacco ban sits in Legislation as a letter of support to the State Legislature, and here as both a letter to Corporation Counsel and a resident's filed concerns. All tabled.
The parking authority and the sale of city ramps sits in Finance twice — correspondence on the sale of city ramps, and the creation of a Buffalo Parking and Mobility Authority — and here as an update item on both. All tabled, on the same day Finance was told the city has already banked $17 million of ramp-sale proceeds.[2][4]
Nine members are recorded on all 76 votes, with no absences, recusals or abstentions. Every vote was unanimous. This is a committee of the Common Council: its votes are recommendations to the full Council, not final actions. The table selects the items that were discussed; the large majority of the docket was tabled without comment.
Roughly 32 minutes of testimony and questioning, the longest discussion across the four committees meeting that day. The filer described a FOIL request of January 1 that produced no executed fund agreement; a proposal in the Mayor's April budget letter to draw on the fund for the police commissioner's salary, then set at $250,000; and three donations made under the name of the Sabres' 1974 hoax draft pick, accepted and then refunded roughly two weeks after he requested donor records.
The committee chair stated that he had voted for salary increases on the strength of what he was told about the fund, that he now wants everything in writing, and that what the Council had been told “has been a lie.” The Deputy Mayor declined to account for representations made before his tenure. Sent up without recommendation; the full Council received and filed it on October 13.
Sponsored by Everhart, Halton-Pope and Wyatt. Its companion in the Legislation Committee is a local law that would replace the existing Committee for Youth with an elected Buffalo Youth Council and a Youth Commission. Both were tabled on the same day in different rooms.
Both tabled. A third vehicle on the same subject — a letter of support to the State Legislature on a flavour and menthol ban — sits in the Legislation Committee and was tabled there the same day.
Tabled here, as were both of its companions in the Finance Committee: correspondence on the sale of city parking ramps, and the creation of a Buffalo Parking and Mobility Authority. All three were tabled on a day the Finance Committee was told the city has already received $17 million in ramp-sale proceeds.
Why this brief is late, and it is our fault. This publication's Buffalo ingest reads the city's CivicClerk portal, which caps a query at fifteen results and returns a link to the next page. Our poller was not following that link and, sorting oldest-first, re-read the same fifteen September meetings twice a day while newer ones accumulated unseen. Fixed October 17; eleven Buffalo meetings were ingested at once. The city published on time.
Capture. 79.2 minutes, faster-whisper “medium,” 803 segments of which 794 are distinct, longest identical consecutive run 1, most frequent segment 0.37%, coverage 99.0% — all within this pipeline's degeneracy thresholds. Converted from the city's own meeting video. Timestamps are elapsed audio.
Who said what. The transcript carries no speaker labels and the model mangles every member's surname. Attributions rest on the chair naming a speaker, a speaker identifying themselves, or the city's recorded-vote file. Members' names follow that file. The resident who filed the item is identified in the city's agenda only by initial and surname, and is referred to here as the record refers to him. The Deputy Mayor is named as he was addressed in the room.
On the donations. The account of what the Community Foundation said and did is the filer's own, given on the record to a committee of the Common Council. The Community Foundation is not a city agency, was not present, and has not been asked by this publication to respond. The significance of the name used is explained in the body because without it the anecdote reads as a technicality rather than as the test it was.
What is not established. Whether an executed fund agreement exists today. No one produced one, and no one at the table said one had been signed.