The resolution at Item 21 has a history built into its title. The Council first asked for its own attorney in 2025 (that resolution, MT 25-1929, is still on the committee's table at Item 39); the September 15 version says “once more.” Majority Leader Leah Halton-Pope, who sponsored both, opened by saying the point was never to “usurp the authority of Corporation Counsel” but to let a Council lawyer “at least draft legislation for us and approve to form.” The Corporation Counsel, she noted, represents the Council, the Mayor's office and the Comptroller's office at once. Then she asked the question directly: under the Charter, can the Council appoint its own counsel?

“A referendum would be required,” the Corporation Counsel said. Halton-Pope's follow-up was the practical one: if a referendum is required, who writes the ballot item, and does the Council get to see it first? She cited the Charter Revision Commission legislation, where the local law Corporation Counsel produced “excluded all of that” the Council had written in, and “we didn't get a chance to see it.” The Counsel said such a measure would go through her office to be approved as to form and certified by the City Clerk, but “I would not send a referendum for something like that to the BOE without your input.” The problem, Halton-Pope said, is that nothing was sent at all: “We missed that August deadline when we were all here, and it didn't make it to the Board of Elections before September 3rd, which means we're missing this election cycle.” Her ask now is the next general election.

The Counsel did not dispute the delay. The item “was caught in our backlog, which frankly we have — our department takes ownership that we have been behind.” The office lost capacity, has been hiring — someone started Monday, someone Thursday, one on the 28th, one the first week of October, one in November — and met “this week to better address our responsiveness to you.” But beyond the referendum, she said, there are “significant concerns” about how privilege, confidentiality and conflicts of interest would work with an attorney who represents only the Council while the Law Department represents the city; “if we had been timely in responding to this we should have communicated those to you in writing.” She asked for “a few months.”

That was the wrong number. “I don't feel good about another couple of months for me,” Halton-Pope said, “and then December 31st is my last day.” She wants a list of every outstanding Council request in the Law Department, with dates, before the end of the year; she reminded the Counsel of the Council's two-year rule under which un-acted items fall off the table; and she said the person the delay hits directly is the Council's policy advisor, an attorney admitted in New York, who “at one point was told that he wasn't a real lawyer” by a predecessor in the Counsel's office. “If the answer is, Leah, we can't get this done in the next ten days, then okay, tell me that.”

Councilmember David Rivera took the long view: the idea goes back to former Council President Darius Pridgen^[*], and the reason is structural. Corporation Counsel is appointed by the Mayor; when the administration and the Council disagree, “I would say 99.9 percent of the time” the Law Department lands on the administration's side. “I can't think of instances where they say, hey, the Common Council was right and we were wrong.” If the Charter houses the Council's lawyer in the Law Department, he said, then the Council needs an attorney there with the “flexibility” and “confidentiality” to draft what the Council asks for “without fear of retaliation or retribution.” The Counsel said the profession's rules on municipal attorneys are “pretty clear,” that a true conflict of interest under the Charter means outside counsel, and that she could assign an attorney focused on the Council's priorities. Rivera: “In a perfect world that would be ideal.”

Halton-Pope closed on geography. The Mayor's liaison to the Council was sitting directly behind the Counsel as she spoke, and a Deputy Mayor's portfolio includes the Law Department, “which doesn't make it very independent.” Her standard was Albany's: the Senate, the Assembly and the Governor each have their own counsel, and the state has a bill-drafting office whose job is to say what can be done. “Don't just keep telling council members what they cannot do.” The motion to table carried; the record shows all seven members present in favor.

Items 7, 8 and 9 were three contracts for “Property Board Up & Securing Services” — with Hannah Demolition, Property Mgmt. Services and Geiter Done of WNY, as the docket names them. Councilmember Bryan Bollman asked the basic question: is this “a shift in the way we're doing board-ups,” which the Mayor's Impact Team has traditionally handled, and is it temporary or permanent, cheaper or just faster?

Commissioner Lou Petrucci^[*] said it is a shift. The Impact Team is “changing in their focus,” and he has been charged with taking over board-ups so that his department handles them directly instead of “making a referral to somebody else.” Under the old system the Department of Public Works got a “cut and clean” request; a supervisor at about $50 an hour and two laborers at about $25 took three and a half to four hours per building; with materials, a typical board-up ran $1,200 to $1,500. The city issued a request for qualifications so it would have “more than one company” to call. Three firms responded. One — the contractor that does board-ups for the agency he called “Bureau,” by context the Buffalo Urban Renewal Agency — “subsequently dropped out,” leaving two candidates that are both former demolition companies. Why would a demolition company want this work? “We're doing less demolitions and they're looking for work,” and they are already set up to respond around the clock. About 110 board-up requests are pending; if the Council approves, the backlog would be split and new jobs assigned alternately. The contractors would take emergency board-ups too, with city crews as the fallback. Bollman's last question — when squatters tear boards off, does the city pay full price again? — got a yes-but: the contracts include a re-board at a lesser rate, and getting people out first “is going to be the coordination with the Buffalo Police.”

Halton-Pope used the item to ask about the buildings the city does not board up. The code specifies the plywood, its thickness, its paint and its fasteners; at St. Ann's, she said, “the door might be this big and then the boarding is like minimal,” the building “was burned twice” in six months, and the same is happening at Elmwood Crossing. “If we as a city actually follow our own code and charter we probably wouldn't have these types of issues, and we could be collecting for this.” Petrucci said the standard his specs follow is the Secretary of the Interior's — half-inch exterior-grade plywood, a two-by-four or two-by-six backer, lag bolts, painted — and that two inspectors found three openings at St. Ann's about a week and a half earlier; the owners have told the city they will do the work themselves. Elmwood Crossing's new owners had a board-up company scheduled for the night before the meeting, he said, and were advised to barricade the alley behind the building. Halton-Pope then asked whether the inspectors had also noticed “the giant hole at the end of the ramp” that seniors and people with disabilities use to reach a tenant's space there. He had not heard of it. The three contracts went to the Council without recommendation, on one motion.

Item 20, Halton-Pope's “Protecting Tenants from Landlord-Caused Utility Shutoffs in Occupied Multiple Dwellings,” came out of a building in her district she called the Forge, where the water was shut off for several hours over an unpaid bill of $33,000 to $34,000 — “I'd never heard of a building being shut off” — affecting seniors, people with disabilities and families. She read the Corporation Counsel a list. Does the city have authority to impose notice requirements on utilities beyond what Public Service Law already requires, or is that pre-empted? (“I don't know the answer. We'll find out. I suspect it's probably a utility-by-utility difference.”) Can the city make a landlord's failure to keep central utilities on a code violation? (Probably something “under that umbrella.”) Can the city require that a shutoff notice go to a specific city official rather than “a mailbox”? (The office is reviewing each utility's notice rules.) Can the city fine, inspect or otherwise escalate against a landlord whose non-payment caused a shutoff? (“We'll get you more information.”) And which parts of the resolution can Buffalo do now versus what needs Albany? “I don't want to speak definitively on that.”

The texture came from the paperwork. The new property manager, Halton-Pope said, gave her a full list of every building's water, electric and gas balances and payment plans — “that is not something that is normal” — and right after that, one building missed an electric bill and a shutoff notice was posted on the outside of the building, which is how a council member found out. One of the non-water bills was $96,000. “It didn't happen in one day and certainly didn't happen in one night, or one month.” Council President Joel Feroleto added the number that made the room go quiet: the project got “over 20 million dollars in state aid,” and he suggested the state require a bond or a set-aside for utilities on any project it funds at that level. “I happen to know someone who's gonna be a state legislator in a few months,” he said. He did not say who. Tabled, pending the Law Department's answers.