Part 1: Kraham Manufactures a Public Safety Crisis to Hide his Own Financial Mismanagement Crisis
Every year, Binghamton is one of more than a thousand local governments that automatically receive multiple grants from US Housing and Urban Development to invest in low-income households and poor neighborhoods to support livable communities and housing justice. Binghamton receives just under $2 million a year from one of these programs, the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG).
When I was Director of Planning, Housing, and Community Development, we leveraged these flexible CDBG dollars to invest in people, places, affordable housing, our local ecosystem of nonprofits, and award-winning community development initiatives.
So when Mayor Kraham introduced a resolution to City Council in June (2025) asking to sweep $368,000 of unspent CDBG funds to purchase fire equipment and vehicles, Council had a lot of reasonable questions.
Like, why are so many CDBG funds sitting idle, unused, when we are in the middle of a housing crisis?
Are there more CDBG funds sitting unused? If so, how much?
Councilmembers asked for a full accounting of unspent CDBG funds and other relevant information before they would consider the legislation for a vote.
Kraham’s responses came out like a slow trickle. In subsequent public meetings (all on video, online), Councilmembers showed growing frustration with the lack of transparency and the administration’s reluctance to give them a full accounting of CDBG finances.
Instead of being a transparent partner, Kraham chose to ratchet up the political rhetoric, holding press events and accusing Council of refusing to protect our first responders in the Fire Department.
When the legislation came up for a vote earlier this month, all seven Council members expressed their deep support to the Fire Department. Some explained they couldn’t support using flexible, housing funds to buy public safety equipment. Enough voted no and the bill was killed.
Mayor Kraham cleared his calendar the next day, organized a press conference at one of the Fire Stations and blasted the Council. A clip of Kraham’s theatrical rage keeps reappearing on my Facebook page as a paid campaign ad (snapshot above).
Calmly, less than two weeks later, Councilwoman Rebecca Rathmell introduced an elegant solution with input and unanimous support from her peers:
- Pull $144,000 from the City’s flush piggybank (more than $13 million at the end of CY2024, according to the City’s own financial reports) to purchase the requested turnout gear. She explained that Kraham had already reached into the piggybank six times this year for far less urgent needs, so this seemed more than appropriate.
- Council promised Fire Chief Gardiner that if he included the vehicles in his 2026 proposed budget, they would approve the request unanimously.
- Commit a portion of the $368,000 in unexpended CDBG funds to the City’s Housing Trust Fund and the rest to support health and safety repairs at low-income public housing sites, like Woodburn Court and Binghamton Housing Authority.
Mayor Kraham threw a tantrum.
He claimed the Council didn’t have the authority to allocate dollars from the City’s fund balance to fund urgent needs. He cited some obscure provision in the City Charter and asserted that only he, as mayor, had that authority.
[For the record, I read the section in the City Charter he referenced and spoke with a senior employee at NYS Comptroller’s Office. We both disagreed with Kraham’s interpretation.]
It seemed the Council decided to call his bluff. On the floor during the Council Business meeting, they made an amendment to the legislation, giving the City Comptroller the express authority to appropriate $144,000 in general fund reserves to purchase turnout gear for firefighters. In other words, if the Mayor wants to claim he has full authority, the Council said, “Have at it. We support you.”
One week later, and Kraham still hasn’t allowed his appointee to carry out the transaction.
To sum it up (I know, it’s weird): this urgent problem of “life and death” that Kraham berated Council for not solving can be solved immediately by Kraham because Council passed legislation giving him the authority to do so, but Kraham now chooses not to solve the “life and death” problem.
Right.
To be fair [pause: author swallows puke], Kraham calls it irresponsible to use the City’s savings to buy the equipment when CDBG funds are available, unused. And the fire equipment and vehicles would be eligible purchases under CDBG rules.
For the record, eligible is not the same as appropriate.
For any reasonable human being (I know, we’re dwindling in numbers these days) Rathmell’s approach was a win-win and a responsible pairing of the most appropriate funds to each “crisis”: reserve funds to solve the urgent mid-year crisis of fire equipment and our federal housing funds to help address our ongoing, deepening housing crisis.
I mean I watched for years while Daivd and Kraham pulled millions from the general fund reserves, with little to no discussion, to support the B-Met owners or the Boscovs owners or to carry out a massive demolition campaign in a re-election year. Asking to pull $144,000 ( peanuts in the grand scheme of municipal finances), from a very healthy piggybank to buy turnout gear that protects our firefighters seems like a no-brainer. Right? I mean, right??
That’s why the whole time I’m watching this, I couldn’t shake this feeling: something’s off, Kraham’s not telling the whole story.
Remember, Kraham is the guy who, as City Deputy Mayor, changed headlines of local media stories during his boss’s re-election campaign in 2017 (full disclosure: against me), and then reposted them on social media to make his boss look better. A journalism student a few years out of college who engaged in some of the most unethical conduct possible. Even Republicans called him out publicly.
I could go on and share about a dozen more instances of Kraham’s lies and con games, but I’d rather just show you how this whole saga is steeped in his lies and con games. Keep reading.
Throughout this two-month exchange between Mayor and Council, Kraham and his Deputy Mayor Megan Heiman would reference threats of the unspent CDBG money being clawed back by the federal government. The framing and language wasn’t consistent, though, which I thought was odd for two individuals who majored in media and journalism and are usually pretty disciplined when it comes to political messaging.
For example, earlier this month, Deputy Mayor Heiman was before Council and framed the administration’s concerns about President Trump’s pattern of clawing back unspent funds across various agencies. But a couple times on the record, Kraham mentioned “timeliness,” which is a very triggering word for nerds like me who know the CDBG program very well.
CDBG has a “timeliness” rule, which is that communities that receive annual allocations must not have more than 1.5 times their annual award unspent or it may result in a reduction of future CDBG annual grants.
The rules about this are very specific. The “timeliness” test happens once every year, at the same time. The first time a community is in violation of the timeliness test, HUD issues a nice written letter. If the community fails the timeliness test a second year in a row, HUD issues a more formal warning, asks for a corrective plan, and gauges whether the local government is cooperating. If not, HUD withholds from the next year’s CDBG award an amount equal to the “unused overage.”
To my knowledge, no Binghamton mayor since 1980 has ever had CDBG funds taken away from future awards because they failed the timeliness test two years in a year. It takes a whole lot of incompetence—or incredible indifference to the needs of low-income households or poor neighborhoods—to violate this program rule and compel HUD to take funds away from future awards.
But I think Jared Kraham might be the first mayor in Binghamton’s history to earn this dishonorable distinction. And I’m starting to think (with a high degree of confidence) that this was the real reason for the Mayor’s urgent ask to allocate CDBG funds on fire equipment and vehicles.
Why do I think this?
I’ll explain below, but please, just think about this for a minute.
If indeed Kraham was under the gun, after multiple warnings from HUD, to urgently spend a few hundred thousand dollars because they’d been sitting idle for years, I ask you to revisit this whole saga though this new lens.
It’d mean that the Fire Union President and Fire Chief never came running into Kraham’s Office, yelling “Help, help, we’re in desperate need of safety equipment and vehicles.”
But that Jared Kraham went running into the Fire Chief’s Office, yelling, “Help, help, I need you to tell me something I can spend about $400,000 on immediately!”
It’d also mean that when Council raised reasonable questions, Jared Kraham ginned up this ‘public safety’ crisis, smeared Council for being against public safety (whatever the hell that means), and used the union and the fire station as props in his re-election campaign videos.
The only way we’ll know for certain is if HUD did indeed send Timeliness Violation letters two years in a row. Since Kraham hasn’t been transparent with City Council, I submitted a Freedom of Information request for copies of any such letters. Once I hear back, I will update this story accordingly.
Now, back to why I think this is the actual truth, that Kraham conned us all to engage in this divisive battle over who cares more for our honorable firefighters to distract us from the incredible incompetence of him and his team.
A couple weeks ago, pursuant to NY’s Freedom of Information Law, I requested from the City a copy of a financial report I used religiously while serving as Deputy Mayor to monitor our finances year to date. I received the financial report last week, and it represented budget numbers through August 31, 2025.
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
I identified a minimum of more than $800,000 in unused CDBG funds, sitting idle for more than two years (and as long as five)!
In the middle of a crushing housing crisis.
I’m pretty sure that amount brings the City over the timeliness threshold, which is why I’m nearly certain Jared Kraham has been dinged at least once, maybe even twice, for a violation of the Timeliness rule. But even if that’s a dollar short of the threshold, why the hell is Kraham’s administration letting critical housing and anti-poverty funds accrue over years, unused, when there is such an urgent need in the community?
Is it hard to spend CDBG funds? Not if you care about helping people and places in need.
Will Jared Kraham be Binghamton’s first mayor to so wildly mismanage federal housing funds amidst a housing crisis that HUD will have no choice but to CUT Binghamton’s future CDBG award? Maybe.
But here’s something we do know for sure, now. Folks, this was never a fire department crisis. This was never a public safety crisis.
This was always a financial mismanagement crisis of Kraham’s doing, and he played us all with divisive rhetoric to keep it hidden.
This investigative series (with a lot of personal commentary) will cut through the political rhetoric and manipulation and shed light on the incompetence of the Kraham administration. Yes, I am writing this before an election. Yes, I think Jared is a slick-talking con-man that has squandered opportunities but then still dares us to celebrate his mediocrity. In other words, I am trying to educate voters about this train wreck that poses as an effective leader. But I promise: I will always base my commentary on publicly-available documents, the facts, and my own local government experiences (and a few remaining City Hall informants). I try to link the supporting documents where possible, but if anybody wants to see the data or the documents I reference, just reach out to modocpress@yahoo.com. Happy to share.