For more than 60 years, Locust Street Art has provided free or low-cost arts classes for children and adults.
Housed in a former convent, the nonprofit is a fixture of Buffalo’s Fruit Belt neighborhood.
As a small organization with tight budget margins, board member Heather Gring said they can make a little go a long way.
“If we were able to get a $5,000 grant from the city, that would keep one of our classes free for everyone who comes to it for an entire semester,” she said.
Instead, potentially transformative cash slated for community groups like theirs remains untouched in city accounts.
BTPM NPR has found the City of Buffalo has repeatedly failed to distribute funds earmarked for arts, cultural and anti violence initiatives despite allocating at least $2 million for the purpose since 2013. The city does not always publish how much to set aside each year in this budget line, so the total is likely higher.
For more than a decade, most of this funding has sat languishing in city coffers - leaving Buffalo’s arts and cultural groups without crucial cash and city support.
Since 2020 alone the City of Buffalo has allocated approximately $1.6 million to its ‘Grants in Aid of Arts and Anti Violence’ budget line, but only $190,000 of that -- just 12% -- has hit the streets.
And for Locust Street Art?
“We really have not seen any funds from the cultural and anti violence line in the city budget, perhaps ever,” Gring said.
That’s because the city is not following procedures set by local law for how groups should access the funds.
City not following local law
The City of Buffalo has not issued an official callout for groups to apply for the cash -- known as a Request for Proposals or RFP -- since 2017 according to public records obtained by BTPM NPR. And the city charter states those applications are to be reviewed by an Arts and Cultural Funding Advisory Committee composed of 17 appointed representatives from Buffalo’s cultural community, which then recommends recipients to the city’s arts commission and its Executive Director, Emerson Barr.
But that committee does not exist, and the Buffalo Arts Commission, which the charter empowers to oversee the arts and anti violence budget line, has operated without a fully stacked quorum for “at least five years” according to commission chair, Catherine Gillespie.
“Mayor Brown didn’t make the appointments,” Gillespie explained, referring to former Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown, who stepped down from his position in 2024 for another job after an 18-year stint at the helm.
Instead, the RFP process was conducted by the city’s law department for at least two fiscal years, as demonstrated by RFPs for the 2015 to 2016 and 2017 to 2018 funding cycles.
Barr has filed requests for public art installations, also overseen by the arts commission, but that budget is separate from those earmarked for community groups.
The arts commission works in an advisory capacity only with no “legal teeth,” Gillespie said.
“But we can request,” she added. “We requested from Mayor Brown multiple times that we be involved, and he chose, for whatever reasons, not to have us involved.”
A spokesperson for Brown did not return BTPM NPR’s request for comment.
In a January 2023 letter submitted to the common council, Gillespie even made an official recommendation that the arts commission disperse the funding, but with no change.
Arts Commission Executive Director Barr, who was appointed to the role by Brown, also failed to respond to an interview request. Unlike the commission members, Barr is a paid city employee and earned $71,392 last year according to city payroll data. He was once a legislative aide to Brown during his time on the common council, and before he became mayor in 2006.
Barr was made aware of the stalled cash along with the arts commission and common council, as evidenced by an August 2023 letter from advocacy groups the Greater Buffalo Cultural Alliance and the Partnership for the Public Good.
Though the council discussed the contents of the letter, it was received and filed (the equivalent of being sent to a legislative junkyard) and the funding problems continued on.
Cash still stalled under Scanlon
Though most of the funding problems occurred during Brown’s tenure, the cash has still largely been paused since Acting Mayor Chris Scanlon took office in October 2024.
The city once again failed to issue an RFP this fiscal year, and as of April 6 city hall has distributed just $58,000 of the $400,000 budgeted for arts and anti violence groups – that’s 14.5%.
With the end of the fiscal year looming on June 30, it is unlikely the remaining $342,000 will get to community groups.
Scanlon attributed the pause to the city’s financial woes.
“When I ended up in the mayor's office in October, we discovered a $17 million hole for the current year, so we had to start looking at any expenditures we were making. So we kind of held the line on a lot of things,” he said.
He added that his administration is finalizing a process to get the money spent “in the very very near future.”
The acting mayor’s administration has allocated $400,000 for arts and anti violence initiatives in the proposed budget for the upcoming fiscal year, which is now under review by the common council. Scanlon said he has reviewed the city charter and is “continuing to work through” the commissions and committees.
“I would absolutely want to be as transparent as possible with this money, and make sure it's going out to groups who really need it, and we’ll help them along the way to meet the goals of their initiatives if they want that help,” Scanlon said.
Unclear process; lack of transparency
As the Executive Director of Arts Services Western New York - a nonprofit that helps arts organizations access funding - Jen Swan-Kilpatrick has been tracking the city’s arts and anti violence budget line since it was established under the Brown administration in 2013.
She explained the city’s distribution of the cash has been “hit and miss” from the start and confirmed the city last issued an RFP eight years ago through its law department in 2017.
“What became obvious to us was there were several years along that process where an RFP would not be released, or funding would be delayed one year in, one year out,” she said.
Swan-Kilpatrick said she chased the funds multiple times over the years but with little impact. BTPM NPR has seen one such attempt – a 2020 email sent to the city’s law department inquiring after the missing funds, to which the staffer responded they “don’t have any information to share.”
But clouding the issue further is the money that has been trickling out each year even though no RFP was issued.
That stumps Swan-Kilpatrick, whose organization partners with municipalities across the region to help them administer arts funding.
“I'm not actually clear why there would be any money coming out of that line, especially if there's no formal RFP going out,” she said.
Gring of Locust Street Art, agrees.
“Unfortunately, what it has seemed to be in practice, is that those funds are not then distributed or spent in any way that feels like there's a process that the layperson could understand,” she said.
“That does speak to the nature of some aspects of the city, which is there's not a lot of transparency around how decisions are made.”
When asked about the money that has limped out of city accounts this fiscal year, Scanlon admitted he does not know how the cash was awarded either, and “would have to look into it.”
BTPM NPR tracked the arts and anti violence money using the city’s own data and identified the organizations which received the dollars over the last four fiscal years, despite a lack of formal process.
After contacting several recipients, only one group leader responded and agreed to speak to BTPM NPR on the condition of anonymity to avoid jeopardizing future city support.
They said their group received the cash after applying to a Buffalo common councilmember for some of their allocated discretionary funds. They were not aware that money came from the arts and anti violence budget. The group leader made it clear they would prefer a more transparent process to access regular funding as laid out in the city charter, because applying to councilmembers involves navigating political relationships and can be “unfair.”
"A lot of the groups out here doing the great work don’t necessarily get recognized because it's based on the politics of ‘well did you support me?’ or ‘it's not in my district,’” they said.
Gring also wants a fair process in the future.
“We want to see these funds getting out, but we would like to see them getting out in a manner where there is accountability and where there is transparency and a process that is available to everybody, right?”
