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Earlier today, Governor Kathy Hochul announced new, $50 million of targeted investments as part of the state’s ongoing efforts to address the immediate needs of East Buffalo community in wake of the white supremacist terror attack at Tops Supermarket on May 14, 2022.
VIDEO of the event is available on YouTube here and in TV quality (h.264, mp4) format here.
AUDIO of the event is available here.
PHOTOS will be available on the Governor’s Flickr page.
A rush transcript of the Governor’s remarks is available below:
Good afternoon everyone, and happy Juneteenth from Buffalo, New York, the second largest celebration in the country. I am joined here by incredibly hard-working, dedicated individuals. Particularly in the last month, since the massacre of our neighbors, they have truly risen to the occasion. I’m so proud of their work. Let me first recognize Mayor Brown, who’s been a partner. For someone of his depth of passion for this community, but also his sense of urgency that I share, to do whatever we can in the short term and the long term to lift this community up. So to Mayor Brown. I’m also joined by our new attorney, our new Lieutenant Governor Antonio Delgado, who has joined us here in Buffalo. It’s not his first time. He’s been here many times. And I thank him for his service as well.
Our Attorney General Letitia James, who came on the ground, was there to talk about what we can do to figure out white supremacist actions, and find them on the internet before they manifest into actions. I want to thank her for taking the lead on that in partnership with us as well. I know it’ll be joined shortly by the Majority Leader, Crystal People-Stokes, who we just marched with. Senator Tim Kennedy has joined us. Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz. Legislative Chair April Baskin.
And also our community leaders. We had a meeting yesterday, and talked about some of the ideas that you’re gonna hear come forward today. Thomas Beauford, President of the Buffalo Urban League. Catherine Roberts, the President of the Resource Center of Western New York. Alex Wright, the African Heritage Food Co-op. Drea d’Nur, the President and Founder of Feed Buffalo. Dee Johnson, President and Founder of the Witness Project. And for my administration, Hope Knight, the Chair of Empire State Development.
It’s been a month. It’s been a long painful month in the eyes of the nation around our community. We had hoped to be on always the positive, but this time, people shared in our pain. As I traveled the state of New York, I can’t tell you the number of people, strangers, who come up to me, who knew how deeply I care about this community, who just offered a hug or some comfort to know what a painful experience we all just came through.
And to talk about this on a day when we honor the end of slavery, two years after it was supposed to happen, there were people imprisoned still, enslaved in Texas. In Texas, who never knew that they had been finally released. And that long journey toward real civil rights may have started back at that time. But it is still unfinished business, as we have seen today, when there’s still rampant racism, and as we saw manifest itself here on May 14th. White supremacists, who have such hate in their hearts that they’ll travel to a community like Buffalo and end the lives and the lives of 10 good Buffalonians.
So we talk about that, we talk about our responsibility to take care of this community, the immediate needs, the pain, the need for basic services for food, transportation, mental health services, social services, in the immediate term. And that’s what we started with. We started with a real investment on the ground, to talk about $3 million immediately in federal and state funding for services. We had the State Office of Victim Services here immediately, setting up organizations for additional funding, partnering with ride-share companies, because I said, “How are they gonna get to the grocery store?” I said, “Call Uber, call Lyft, tell them I need their help. Let’s change the bus routes. Let’s make it free. Let’s do whatever we can to help people overcome what they’ve been through.”
And this is something I spoke with President Biden about, when I asked him to come to Buffalo and he was getting busy for a trip to Asia, but I said, “This community needs you.” There is no one more empathetic than President Biden. We brought him here, we talked about the resources from the Federal Government, State Government, to do what we can to help lift this community up. But even before this time, some people think that we, all of a sudden, started paying to the needs of the East side of Buffalo, or government has not cared about the needs of East side Buffalo for decades.
I will say that is true, but that started turning around with my first budget, back in January, when I announced that we would spend a billion dollars, and this is something that was promoted seriously by Crystal People-Stokes, Senator Kennedy, Mayor Brown, to have a billion dollars to reconnect the community.
That was one of the reasons there is such segregation, a community divided by a highway. That highway should no longer exist. It is time to heal the wounds of a community as well as heal the nature of the Kensington Expressway and literally close it up and start rebuilding on top of it. Parks recreation, affordable housing amenities, small retail, all that can happen in the place where there has been this asphalt divider between our communities.
We also, at the time allocated $37 million for the Broadway Market, $30 million for the Michigan Street African American Heritage Corridor. Six million to support Martin Luther King Park, we just visited there a few minutes ago. $55 million more for Northland Corridor Redevelopment phase three. $21 million for the Northland Workforce Training Center and $55 million for the Central Terminal.
So that is what we had in place prior to the devastation of May 14th. But when I sent my team on the ground, I said, I want you to peel back. These are great transformative projects, but what’s happening at the human level? What other needs are unmet? And I’m not going to leave any stone unturned until we figure out how to give this community what it needs to heal, to come back, rebound, but thrive and be in a place better than they had been before these investments were made.
So that is why we are announcing, and we have Catherine Roberts here today, the Eastside Resiliency Center which will result in $3 million in state aid. To be on the ground, be the place that people know to go to, be the place that people can say, “I’m housing insecure. I need a roof over my head. I need more services. I need to figure out mental health services. I need to figure out where to get food tomorrow.”
I am so proud that Catherine has been on the ground with her team already, but let’s formalize that. Let’s make this long-standing, let’s make this long-term. So we’re announcing $3 million in state aid, a lot with more money to come for that as well.
But I said, that’s great to get started with, but I said, let’s go big. Let’s be bold. We’ve identified an additional $50 million of resources for the east side of Buffalo. I am so proud of this, but I didn’t come up with this on my own. This is the result of my team being engaged with the mayor’s office, the majority leader’s office, the senator’s office, and everyone involved and the clergy.
And the leaders of the not-for-profits, who we have been working with since day one, literally yesterday, I sat down with them. I said, tell me what’s on your mind? What else do you need? And as a result, this $50 million is a start toward addressing those needs. So we have identified $36.5 million in services for housing and social services.
What am I talking about? We have over 4,000 homeowners on the east side who are behind in their payments for their bills. Their water bills, their sewer bills, their taxes. We have identified $20 million to go give an average award of $5,000 to these individuals to help get them from out from behind the stress of having to make these payments. That is going to start as soon as possible and a time when inflation’s going up and the cost of living continues to rise.
This is going to help liberate these individuals from their back taxes and their back payments. Home repair, we have thousands of people, but we’re going to serve over 1,000 east-side homeowners and help them with their repairs. You see the houses on the east side of Buffalo. Why do they look this way?
Because the cost of repairing them is so exorbitant, especially now is prices continue to grow up. So we’re going to be given grants to over a thousand homeowners. An average of $10,000 each to help them get stabilized, make sure that they’re in compliance with outstanding building code violations, and we’re gonna get that started right away as well.
Throughout history, there has been a racial gap in home ownership, whether it was redlining, whether it was access to capital, the ability to save up for that, that first down payment on a home. We are going to serve 150 first time homeowners with access to down payments, an average of $30,000. $4.5 million to help these individuals be part of a program, get them jumpstarted and allow them the pride of home ownership. Again, 150 people will benefit from that as well.
We also have a public engagement unit we’re funding at the tune of $2 million. And what this is, this is still in draft form, we’re continuing to work with the community on what they’re looking for, but there’s a lot of services out there that people don’t know about. They’re not connected to them. And this is based on a pilot program that has been used in other cities. New York City had this very successfully and after a three-year period in New York City, they were able to identify 300,000 people in need of services that they didn’t know they were eligible for. So that’s the model we’re using here in Buffalo, starting with $2 million for that as well.
That’s a start, but also very, very important to our Mayor was how we memorialize the lives of those we lost. Each was not just a name or a number. It was a person, a personality, an individual behind it, a family, person who had an impact while they lived here in this community. We need to honor that and celebrate that.
So, a huge priority for Mayor Brown, and therefore it’s important to me, is to establish a 5/14 Commission and allow the Mayor to convene the stakeholders and have them develop a plan to properly that day and those individuals going forward forever. So, we’re doing our part in addition to the inspiration of what we saw unfold here in Buffalo, the inspiration for nation-leading laws that were just signed just a couple weeks ago, 10 major bills, 10 major pieces of legislation.
And again, I thank my legislative partners for helping us get that through. Critically important Senator Kennedy, his voice in the Senate. Majority Leader Crystal Peoples-Stokes. Sean Ryan and others really stepped up to say no more, no longer can we turn our eyes away from the fact that access to an AR-15 should not be available for an 18-year-old or a teenager.
We changed that law in response. We worked on our red flag laws. They are now tougher, the model for the rest of the nation. So many other areas where we tightened up laws, closed loopholes, but made sure that we’re doing whatever we can governmentally, in terms of our laws to make sure that we can protect against this from happening again, as well as working with, and holding accountable, the social media companies that allowed the spread of this hate speech, whether it’s what the replication of what would happen in New Zealand a number of years ago at the Christchurch massacre, we saw the same words in the manifesto used by the killer here in Buffalo.
So that’s another whole dynamic. It’s complicated. It has an intersection of free speech rights, but I also think that we have to hold people accountable and stop, start stopping the spread of white supremacist views and other views of hatred, such as replacement, replacement theories and other areas where people are becoming radicalized through social media.
We’ve got a lot to do, but I wanted this community to know this is my home. This is deeply personal to me. And I have seen the specter of segregation and racism, and we are going to continue eradicating the core purposes, why it exists, try to change the hearts and minds, but also eradicate the injustice that still lives today.
And through these investments, on top of what we had already been started, already been working on, in my fairly new administration, coupled with this additional $50 million at this time. And we’re going to continue working to lift up businesses. We have plans for business incubators incentivizing money for small businesses to be developed as well.
We have a lot of ideas, but I want to make sure the commitment is clear. This is not a press conference day. We walk away. This is a long-standing personal commitment from the Governor of New York State to this community. And together we will start to make a difference and let this community know they matter and to give them hope that the better days do lie ahead.
And with that, I want to thank my partner and welcome up my partner in this whole process, Mayor Byron Brown. I cannot say enough, to see your leadership in action at a time when you are needed the most. And I thank you for having a critical role in developing these ideas because you know what this community needs, you want us to deliver and as a result, we’re here today. Mayor Byron Brown.
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