Today Buffalo’s Common Council reached a deal that will end a three-month old fight over 2009 capial spending between the Council’s five-member majority and Mayor Byron Brown.

The crux of the fight had been that the mayor wanted money for infrastructure improvement projects—curbs, sidewalks, road repairs—in a single, citywide pot that he ouwld control. The five members of the Council majority argued that in the past two years the mayor had divided that pot of money inequitably, punishing political foes and rewarding friends. So the Council earmarked that money, making pots specific to each district.

The mayor, furious, vetoed the pots of money for four of the five majority members, while leaving pots of money for the four coucnilmembers who support him. (He also left a pot of money for the Niagara District, hoping to peel Niagara’s David Rivera away from the majority. That didn’t work.)

Unable to overturn the mayor’s veto, the Council instead delayed the sale of bonds to finance the mayor’s capital budget. Today, after weeks of bullheadedness on both sides, the ongoing negotiations (and they were ongoing, no matter what mayoral employees Peter Cutler and Peter Savage kept telling the Buffalo News) yielded a compromise: The five individual pots of infrastructure improvement money the mayor had left in the budget for Niagara, Ellicott, Masten, North, and University districts would be returned to a citywide pot totaling $3.4 million.

Which the mayor will control.

It’s not an absolute return to the mayor’s original proposal—the Council’s amended budget had made some other, minor changes that mayor did not or could not veto—but it’s close.

Lovejoy’s Rich Fontana told the Buffalo News that councilmember were assured that the $3.4 million would be spent equitably across the city’s nine districts.

The compromise will be ratified tomorrow afternoon, when the Council votes to aprove the bond sales.