Democratic Binghamton City Council Member Olamni Porter abruptly resigned earlier this month, after about a year in the position.
Porter was elected to represent the city’s 1st District in November 2023, when Democratic candidates swept the city council elections and secured a supermajority.
He said he did not expect to win the race, and never planned to run for a second term. He cited many reasons he decided to step down, including challenges in his personal life.
“I had family problems, I had health issues, it was just too much for me, and I felt like I had to save myself before saving anybody else and dealing with certain things,” Porter said.
From the start, Porter said the council faced pushback and resistance from the mayor’s office. He said the conflict began with a legal battle between the mayor’s office and the council, over which branch of government could appoint a vacant council seat after a tied race in 2023.
City council members, he said, were told they had to file public records requests to access information from city departments, and they were not allowed to speak with city employees, but had to go through department heads.
Despite the Democrats’ supermajority on the council, Porter said he felt that it was difficult to pass substantive legislation to address housing and mental health needs in the community.
“I’ve never seen a system so broken that it has to stay broke in order for it to work. And nobody wants to fix it because it works for their advantage of doing certain things,” Porter said.
He argued the previous city council "rubber stamped" legislation that the mayor's office wanted passed. He feels they intentionally spent most of the city's federal funding through the American Rescue Plan Act, before the next council took over, so the new council members would have less funding to allocate.
Porter said when the current council tried to give federal stimulus funding to a local housing nonprofit, they were told all the money had been allocated. The organization ultimately recieved the funds, but Porter said the process with the mayor’s office was frustrating.
“Instead of trying to solve some of the problems, we were looked at like we were a nuisance.... and that's the attitude of this city,” Porter said. “It's a nuisance when you're trying to stand up for the rights of people.”
Porter said he felt the Democratic council members were not unified enough, and that they compromised too often with Republican Mayor Jared Kraham.
He said he was also angered by the way the city dealt with an investigation by the New York attorney general’s office that found a Binghamton police officer used excessive force during a 2023 arrest.
Porter thinks the city should be restructured and run by a city manager rather than a mayor.
“We no longer need a strong mayor government, because a tyrant Democrat or Republican can make it bad,” Porter said. “We could do just what Ithaca does, and other municipalities have done, create a city council and city-manager government where city council and city manager work together."
In response, Mayor Jared Kraham told WSKG he had never received requests for information from Porter, and that his office communicates regularly with city council.
“Councilman Porter never reached out once for either an information request, a meeting with myself or the deputy mayor,” Kraham said. “When more than a year goes by and there's zero emails to to me or members of my staff, that's not a person who's interested in getting information as it relates to the process.”
Kraham said he did direct council members to bring issues or requests to city department heads rather than employees, because he felt it was more efficient for city operations.
Kraham also said he stands by the way the city’s federal stimulus funds were allocated, especially when it comes to housing. He said in 2021, Binghamton voters chose to elect him to guide the allocation of federal stimulus funds.
“A big part of that race was determining who would be the mayor in charge of spending and allocating and budgeting nearly $46 million in this American Recovery Plan Act funding, and voters selected me,” Kraham said. “And so voters decided, and I put together a very aggressive plan of action, investing in things like gun violence prevention, youth programming, and more so than any other municipality in our area, affordable housing.”
To fill the vacant seat, the city council can appoint a resident of the 1st District to serve until the November general election.