Mayor says Buffalo’s higher snow removal costs may spur tax hike

Buffalo Mayor Byron W. Brown on Tuesday said that city crews proved during two recent snowstorms that they learned from the Blizzard of 2022 and are up to the task of clearing snow much quicker and more efficiently than in years past.

But the mayor warned that as extreme storms become more common, providing that level of services will most likely lead to an increase in property taxes – possibly as early as next year.

“It’s possible,” Brown said during a meeting with reporters and editors of The Buffalo News when asked if he would propose a tax hike. “This year’s budget is going to be challenging. There’s absolutely no question about it.”

Brown said the two mid-January snowstorms cost the city $6.6 million, including overtime for city public works crews. By comparison, the 2022 blizzard cost the city $10 million, he said.

“It was an expensive operation,” he said of the most recent storms. “I just want to bring it to the attention of the public that the expectation people have, what they want to see, what they want done, is very expensive. When you layer other responsibilities onto that, the cost is just going to go up.”

For years, the city’s snow plan consisted of clearing main roads, then secondary routes. After those were cleared, they would start snow removal on residential streets.

“That’s how it always used to be, even before I became mayor,” Brown said. “That was the standard city snow plan. But now, the public is saying, ‘We don’t want that. We want more than that. We don’t just want our main streets and our secondary streets opened up, but we simultaneously want our residential streets opened up.’”

For this January’s storms, that meant having private contractors “retained, staged and ready to go” in each neighborhood. Roughly $5 million of the $6.6 million cost of the recent storm went to pay private plow contractors, Brown said. The…