The Buffalo Common Council is making moves to spend money budgeted for arts, cultural and anti-violence initiatives.
Previous reporting by BTPM NPR found the City of Buffalo spent just 12% of a budgeted $1.6 million for arts and anti-violence groups over five years. The city has not been following procedures laid out in local law to disperse the cash.
But Council Majority Leader Leah Halton-Pope is proposing to change that.
The Ellicott District representative is trying to get this year’s allocation out of city coffers before the end of the fiscal year on June 30th.
The city budgeted $400,000 in its ‘cultural and anti-violence’ budget line for FY 2024-2025, but just $58,000 has been spent so far according to the city budget. However, Halton-Pope told BTPM NPR she believes that number is more in the region of $158,000 to date.
In a memo to Buffalo’s Acting Mayor Chris Scanlon, she proposes that $200,000 be reinstated to Buffalo’s frontline arts groups. The city withdrew the same amount in federal American Rescue Plan (ARP) dollars from Frontline Arts Buffalo last December in a last-minute dash to meet the end-of-year deadline to get the cash under contract. At the time, Scanlon committed to getting funding to the groups in future.
Halton-Pope told BTPM NPR it was “priority one” to see the money gets reinstated this fiscal year.
“We need to make sure we took care of our frontline arts,” she said.
The proposal, which is part of the council's budget amendments, also includes a further $267,375 for those groups for the 2025-2026 fiscal year, as well as allocations to support the city's poet laureate and historian positions.
City Poet Laureate, Aitina Fareed-Cooke, and City Historian, Lindsey Lauren Visser, were appointed to the volunteer roles by former Mayor Byron Brown in March 2024. Halton-Pope said both will remain unpaid positions, but the money will fund community programming by the pair: $82,625 to support the poet laureate-related programming for this fiscal year and next, and $10,375 to support the city historian programming this fiscal year which increases to $50,000 in FY 2025-2026.
“We have a poet laureate, and we have a city historian and there are no resources behind the work that they need to do,” Halton-Pope explained. “And the poet laureate has come up with programming that is part of the art space that's actually helping our community, city wide, in all nine councilmanic districts.”
The councilmember’s proposal also includes $110,000 for the city’s youth arts contest this year and recommends the city enroll the mayor’s summer youth program participants in the poet laureate programming to “generate potential cost savings.”
Locust Street Art in the city’s Fruit Belt neighborhood was one of the non-profits that lost out on promised ARP funds last December. Board member Heather Gring said she is “heartened” that Halton-Pope is looking for a way to replace the funds.
“She's definitely looking for solutions to rectify what happened with the American Rescue Plan funds,” she said.
Ujima Theater - another frontline arts group impacted by the withdrawal of ARP cash - said in an email they “welcome the news of the possibility of regaining funds for frontline arts, particularly for the work of the member organizations of Frontline Arts Buffalo.”
But added: “At this point we await next steps in the process before we celebrate, knowing how far we had gotten in the last funding process for funding to ultimately be pulled. We hope that this is just the first step in getting a proper process in place to allow access to arts and cultural funding from the city for the many organizations and artists that add such vibrancy to our communities here in Buffalo.”
Gring echoed that call for a proper process. She is concerned that the proposal for the upcoming fiscal year does not follow the city charter, which outlines procedures to disperse the cash.
“We do need the space for a transparent and straightforward process that anyone, no matter their connections, can participate in, because that is true, equality and equity,” Gring said.
The city has not issued an official callout for groups to access the funds since the 2017-2018 fiscal year. According to the city charter, an advisory committee of 17 people is supposed to review the applications and recommend how the funding be dispersed, but BTPM NPR found that committee does not exist.
Halton-Pope agreed that the city should follow its own charter, and told BTPM NPR her proposal is “just the start” in addressing the city’s cultural and anti-violence funding issues. However, she believes the frontline arts portion of the cash should be administered by an outside entity because the city is “slow” to get the money out.
“I really think that it should be a fiscal steward, or financial steward that would be the person that can make sure that money gets disseminated. I think sometimes we make things so arduous, especially for our arts community, to get resources. We should make it a little bit easier,” Halton-Pope said.
Scanlon previously told BTPM NPR the cultural and anti-violence fund had been stalled this fiscal year while his administration assessed the city’s finances.
“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.
Halton-Pope’s proposal will be discussed in the council’s finance committee meeting, Tuesday.
