On Wednesday, October 25, 2023, I attended the first meeting of the City of Buffalo’s Board of Ethics since July 2023. These meetings are not widely announced; Stephanie Adams and I are the only members of the public who attend them. At this meeting, the ethics board took the remarkable step of unanimously moving to issue subpoenas to fourteen current and former city employees and members of other boards who have failed to submit annual financial disclosures as required by the city’s code of ethics. The ethics board said that the subpoenas will call the fourteen people to testify at the next ethics board meeting, on November 29, where the ethics board will ask them why they haven’t filed the required disclosures. If the board finds a city officer or employee in violation of the code of ethics, it can impose a fine of up to $10,000 dollars for each violation.
According to meeting materials obtained via a Freedom of Information Law request, one of the fourteen in delinquency is former Preservation Board member Terrence Gilbride, currently an attorney at Hodgson Russ LLP, who hasn’t filed disclosures for 2019, 2020, or 2021. Another attorney in delinquency is Environmental Management Commission member Charles Grieco, who hasn’t filed disclosures since 2020, although it’s unclear if the environmental commission has met in recent years. Two current Preservation Board members, four Buffalo Sewer employees, and two Planning Board members are among those who have not filed their 2023 disclosures, which were due in January.
How did we get here? In September 2021, Stephanie Adams, on behalf of herself and about 140 other residents of Buffalo, submitted to the Board of Ethics a letter of complaint concerning a political advertisement for Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown’s 2021 reelection campaign, which appeared on local television and on Facebook. The campaign ad featured nearly twenty people whom the ad identified as Buffalo police officers and falsely claimed that proposed budget cuts by the Democratic nominee, India Walton, required police officers to lose their jobs. The complaint did not concern the content of the ad’s messaging but rather the participation of police officers who invoked their official roles for a political purpose, which is prohibited by state and federal law, as well as the Buffalo Police Department’s policies, and could be a violation of the city’s code of ethics.
Having heard nothing about the status of the complaint nearly one year later, I requested the ethics board’s 2021 and 2022 meeting materials from the city clerk, who replied that the board had not been meeting since 2020. I mentioned this to an Investigative Post journalist, who then reported in August 2022 that the Board of Ethics had not met since February 2020 and that all five of its appointed seats were vacant. Three weeks later, the mayor appointed five new members to the board, four of them having donated to his electoral campaigns.
Since then, Stephanie Adams and I have closely followed the proceedings of the ethics board, which has been investigating and discussing the complaint in private since December 2022, in addition to scrutinizing delinquencies in the filing of financial disclosures. At the end of the October 25 meeting, the board chair reported that the board believes that it will come to a decision on the complaint at its November 29 meeting, which will is scheduled at 1 P.M. in Buffalo City Hall Room 1417.