Should the state pay $5 million for sidewalks in Clarence?

So when the City of Clarence recently revealed it had won a $5 million infrastructure grant, it was surprising to see who criticized the award:

Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown.

Brown’s comments came when he was asked earlier this month about a report that found city policies allowed wealthy property owners to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. He said the group behind the report, Our City Action Buffalo, needed to focus on broader equity issues.

“I’ve talked about the inequities that exist,” Brown told the Buffalo News. “This is another glaring example of that inequity: a $5 million grant for sidewalks in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the country, Clarence Center.”

Clarence Supervisor Patrick Casilio said it was a competitive application process and the matching grant required the city to spend $5 million of its own money on the project.

The Republican supervisor said the city was seeking revenue for a project that would benefit its residents — just as city officials do on behalf of their constituents — and he didn’t take the Democratic mayor’s salvo personally.

“He has to run the city and I have to run my city,” Casilio said. “I can’t worry about that.”

But a University at Buffalo professor who has long studied regional inequality went even further than the mayor in criticizing the state’s decision to give Clarence millions of dollars in aid.

“Equity means you spend money where it’s needed, not give it to everybody,” said Henry-Louis Taylor Jr., who directs UB’s Center for Urban Studies and is a frequent critic of the Brown administration. “But I agree: The state should not give anything to these exclusive suburbs. I repeat: It should not give them anything. The federal government should not give anything to these wealthy suburbs.”

The Clarence matching grant from the state Department of Transportation will help fund more than 9 miles of new sidewalks in downtown Clarence.

Currently, the sidewalks in the hamlet are intermittent and do not run along both sides of the road, Casilio said.

It is a Federal Highway Administration (FHA) fund managed by the state DOT. The funding comes from two environmentally friendly federal programs: the Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Improvement Program, or CMAQ, and the Carbon Reduction Program, or CRP.

Casilio told the News that not all city residents agreed to funding the sidewalks.

“People in Clarence have questioned the sidewalks. They said, ‘We need to fix the county roads,’” the supervisor said. “I can’t go and fix the county roads and get grants for those roads. The county has to do that.”

Asked about the fairness of the state providing a grant to a wealthy community like Clarence, Casilio noted that Clarence Center is one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods.

“It’s in a neighborhood that’s been around for 200 years. It’s not like we’re using it in Spaulding Lake or Spaulding Green,” he said, referring to two newer subdivisions where million-dollar mansions are not uncommon.

The median household income in Clarence in 2022 was $116,400 and the median value of an owner-occupied home is $366,600, according to census data.

In Buffalo, the median household income is $46,200 and the median home value is $132,100.

Socioeconomic measures like these show Buffalo has a greater need for public funding, Brown said.

The mayor, for example, recently asked that the city receive a larger share of sales tax revenues that are distributed among cities and towns in Erie County.

This may explain the mayor’s response when asked about the Notre Ville Action report.

“The agenda they should be pursuing is that people pay their fair share, no matter where they live in the area,” Brown told The News. “For example, this weekend it was reported that Clarence Center — one of the wealthiest areas in the country — just received a $5 million grant from New York state for sidewalks. So the question would be, why isn’t this group that cares so much about equity talking about it?”

Harper Bishop, the group’s executive director, said the mayor’s response was an attempt to distract from the key points raised by the Our City Action report.

Our analysis found that owners of homes valued at $400,000 or more last year in Buffalo saw their property taxes decrease by an average of 9 percent over the past four years.

And 10 major urban developers paid a total of $6 million less on their commercial properties in 2023 than they would have paid if their properties were taxed at the full commercial rate, the group found.

“As our name implies, Our City Action Buffalo’s work focuses exclusively on the City of Buffalo,” Bishop wrote in an email. “Equity is at the heart of everything we do – from redistricting to reassessments – and our recently released report once again highlights the vast inequities and disparities that currently exist in Buffalo, inequities and disparities that the mayor ultimately contributed to and has the power to change.”

Buffalo is not eligible for CRP funding, but the city has received $5.1 million in CMAQ funding since 2021, including money for an electric vehicle charging network, the DOT reported.

Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office noted that the state has provided or promised hundreds of millions of dollars to Buffalo during her tenure.

For example, the state has committed about $60 million to address inequities on Buffalo’s East Side after the May 14 racist massacre, pledged $1 billion for the Kensington Expressway project and included $945 million in this year’s budget for the city’s schools.

Buffalo received $161 million in Municipal Aid and Incentives (MAI) funding this year, 50 percent more than any other community, Hochul’s office said. MAI funding accounts for 28 percent of the city’s overall revenue.

“Governor Hochul and Mayor Brown have a strong partnership and we will continue to work together to help Buffalo thrive,” a spokesperson for the office said.

Brendan Mehaffy, executive director of the city’s Office of Strategic Planning, said the mayor’s point was that the city deserves more funding because, among other reasons, it has a higher poverty level, more brownfield sites in the region and is home to cultural, medical and other venues that draw people from across the region.

“And that’s not to deny that Clarence certainly has its needs,” Mehaffy said. “But the city of Buffalo has much greater needs and provides a lot of these regional services that you don’t find in the surrounding municipalities.”

Buffalo created most of the region’s wealth in previous centuries, but much of its tax base has shifted outside the city’s borders, he said.

He acknowledged that the city had received substantial aid from the state and federal governments.

“People might look at the number and say, ‘Oh, that’s the maximum,’” Mehaffy said. “But the question is, is it enough? And the answer is no.”

UB’s Taylor said residents of places like Clarence have benefited from zoning restrictions, redlining and other historic practices that generated wealth at the expense of Buffalo and its poorest neighborhoods.

“This is not about our ‘fair share.’ The fact is that these suburbs are exclusionary,” Taylor said. “They have policies and programs that are designed to exclude low-income populations and groups. The value of their land and housing is based on racist policies of exclusion.”

Taylor says the effects of these policies are being felt in the city’s demographics. According to census data, 0.5 percent of Clarence’s population is black.

Taylor said the federal and state governments should not provide aid to communities that benefit from “income apartheid.” The governor, a Buffalo native, should be “ashamed” of himself for giving a sidewalk grant to Clarence, he said.

“Let them use their wealth to build their own infrastructure. Let them use their wealth to build their own sewers. Let them use their wealth to build their own roads,” Taylor said. “Why should the public pay for their exclusivity?”