BUFFALO, N.Y. (WKBW) — The Buffalo Common Council approved an amendment by a 5 to 3 vote to use $19 million in American Rescue Plan money that the city had promised to community organizations to plug budget holes instead.
The City of Buffalo received $331 million from the Biden Administration back in 2021 and the city, under former Mayor Byron Brown, had announced a plan to allocate funding to community groups impacted by the pandemic.
But with the city facing budget woes, some of that money was just diverted to deal with the city's deficit.
In addition, there's $11 million in funding that the city said would go toward paying off water bill debts of city residents that went instead to pay for infrastructure improvements.
If the Common Council had voted against the amendment, that money would have had to be returned to the federal government. There's a December 31 to allocate those funds.
7 News spoke with three council members about the decision.
"I still have questions," Majority Leader Leah Halton-Pope, who voted no, said. "I was a no vote last week. When it came up, I was a no vote this morning. But it's also my job to know where things are gonna go and if I know something is still gonna pass, it's not gonna hurt anything I can vote."
"This vote was one of the toughest we've had to take because it was a monumental figure that came through our municipality that we're never going to see again," Fillmore District Common Councilmember Mitch Nowakowski who voted yes said. "And the fact of the matter is the Common Council had to clean up the mess from the Brown administration and their mismanagement of these funds."
"I couldn't reconcile in my mind not using every dollar that was given to the City of Buffalo," President Pro Tempore Bryan Bollman who voted yes said. "These are difficult decisions. This was a very difficult vote."
