Council members on the Buffalo City Council Committee on Finance pressed the Citizens Planning Council, the Office of Strategic Planning and the comptroller's office on Thursday about why so many capital projects remain uncompleted and why councilmatic requests do not always appear in the capital budget.

The comptroller's office told the committee the city had nearly $275,000,000 in projects not completed as of June 30, 2025, and that a portion of those costs is financed with bonds that the city continues to pay. "As of 06/30/2025, the city had almost ... $275,000,000 in projects that have not been completed," said Duane O'Dowd, deputy controller. He said the outstanding bond-related costs include interest and principal but did not present a single reconciled line item in the meeting record.

The accounting and process question landed at the center of a lengthy exchange about the Citizens Planning Council's (CPC) role. "We sit down probably for 6 meetings, listening to every request that's made by department for their needs and wants," Skyler Banks, chair of the Citizens Planning Council, told the committee. Banks said CPC members review departmental requests, ask follow-up questions and submit recommendations to the mayor's office.

Several council members said that despite those reviews, councilmatic district priorities frequently are not reflected in the administration's capital proposal. "When we submit our recommendations for our districts, they are not actually put into the budget versus the priorities of the administration and OSP," Council Member David Rivera said. Rivera and other members asked the CPC and Office of Strategic Planning (OSP) to provide a backcast showing which council requests were included in the proposed capital budget and which were not.

Nadine Marrero, director of the Office of Strategic Planning, described OSP's role as facilitative. "What the Office of Strategic Planning does in this process is administer the process ... We are not there to make decisions, nor do we tell the board which decisions to make," Marrero said. She added that OSP and the Department of Public Works worked this year to flag which DPW projects were "shovel ready" and which required additional planning or design.

Council members pressed a second line of concern: the practice of authorizing projects without issuing bonds for them, known in the discussion as "authorized and unissued" projects. Council Member Rivera said placing a project in an authorized-but-unissued status can help local officials leverage state or federal matching funds, and several members urged that more of the council's priorities be put in that status so the districts could pursue outside funding.

Committee members also cited specific buildings and neighborhoods as evidence of the problem, citing roofs, mold and failing HVAC systems at community centers. "Delavan Grider Community Center's roof was leaking ... there were buckets in the middle of the gym while we were hosting an emergency preparedness event," Council Member Lisa Yeager Eberhard said of a facility she said the city uses as an emergency shelter. Several members contrasted cultural venues receiving capital repairs with community centers that they said had been deferred.

Financial oversight officials urged caution on new borrowing until the city spends prior bond authorizations. "We cannot sit here and say that a cap or to borrow, we have to realize that we have to be fiscally responsible with the city dollars," said Delano Dow, deputy controller. He noted the city sets aside bond debt service each year in the operating budget and warned that continued borrowing reduces money available for operations.

Representatives from the Buffalo Urban Renewal Agency (BURA), which administers federal housing funds and programs, told the committee they can break program data down by category and by district but that doing so requires additional time because HUD reporting categories do not always map to the program names council members use. "We have various tracking sources that can provide specifically ... can I break down for you some of this roof and heat during the furnace? Yes. I will be able to eventually do that," said Scott Billman, co-director at BURA.

The committee asked for detailed reporting on fund sources, district-level expenditures and program-specific outcomes for the last three fiscal years and asked that the agencies file the requested documentation with the council within 60 days.

The meeting ended with a procedural motion to table the capital budget item pending follow-up; the committee did not adopt a final capital budget at the session.

The council signaled it will press the administration and its advisory bodies for a clearer, more traceable presentation of how capital dollars flow from federal and state grants and local bond authorizations into discrete programs such as roof repairs, down-payment assistance and emergency home repair loans.