Mayor Ed Gainey doesn’t respect Pittsburgh
Long before moving to Pittsburgh, a friend of mine spent his early adulthood in Chicago, immersed in 1960s protests, politics and community activism.
I met him when he moved here, in what turned out to be the last decade of his life, to launch a nonprofit development project around his love of music. One year into the effort, he began to remark, “Pittsburgh makes Chicago look like it’s run by choirboys.”
This veteran of the Windy City’s ways professed shock at the level of corruption he was encountering in his new hometown — and this was a decade ago, well before the dawn of the Gainey era.
Corruption, incompetence, folly
These days — despite media stonewalling unprecedented in modern Pittsburgh history— new instances of corruption, incompetence and financial folly flow from Mayor Ed Gainey’s City Hall bunker and regularly fill the pages of this newspaper.
In fact, an August 2023 editorial on how the Gainey administration magically made $10 million designated for the homeless just disappear helped win the Post-Gazette’s editorial writers a prestigious nod as Pulitzer Prize finalists.
Someone should let the Gainey people know this, since they’re not allowed to read newspapers or talk to newspaper reporters. Perhaps they’d be chastened to learn that countless outsiders nationwide see an account of this particular administration’s failure on the Pulitzer website as the first in the bunch from the PG’s excellent team.
Mayor Gainey refuses to respond to any information or interview requests from the Post-Gazette, supposedly out of solidarity with its striking union members. This is bogus, however, because the majority of them long ago broke with union leadership to stay at work and continue putting out the news.
The solidarity drivel is the mayor’s dodge for avoiding the accountability that good journalism delivers. His actions prove he doesn’t want to be held accountable, that’s for sure, but the flow of bad news from Grant Street is endless.
Early April brought internal documents from the Controller’s office detailing how inaccurate the administration’s financial projections are and how abruptly the city is barreling towards a “fiscal cliff.”
Over-spending, missing in action
As half-empty office buildings win lower assessments, property tax revenues continue to plummet, and as the deadline for pandemic assistance dollars to be spent approaches, the interest they’ve earned will dry up. Sunday we learned that despite this huge drop in revenue, Mr. Gainey has gone on a hiring spree, adding more than 100 jobs in Public Works and 34 in City Planning and Permitting.
He’s also added 24 to his own staff, bringing it to triple the size of the Peduto administration.
Well, three times nothing is still nothing.
This is an administration, remember, that was MIA on the day of the verdict in the Tree of Life Massacre last summer, silent for hours except to Tweet and re-Tweet Mr. Gainey’s decision to rename our city “Swiftsburgh” in honor of Taylor Swift’s sold-out weekend of shows.
Bloated payroll was a primary reason why the city was put into financial receivership two decades ago. Ann Dugan, who served on the Intergovernmental Cooperation Authority that oversaw the city’s finances during those difficult times, told the Post-Gazette she sees the Gainey hiring spree as “crazy.”
There’s crazy, and then there’s corrupt. Either is a reasonable explanation for the massive hiring in Public Works. Why would they need 100 new employees if the budgets for paving and sidewalk repair have to be slashed by 70%? Does this mean we’ll see even more road crew members standing around while two colleagues do all the work?
Patronage jobs have existed in every government known to man. In Pittsburgh, it’s how rival Democratic factions divvy up the spoils as each gets its turn on top at City Hall.
Many citizens shrug off a certain amount of such behavior as inevitable — up to a certain point. For most of us voters, though, plunging the city into the fiscal abyss would be a bit too far.
Is Mayor Gainey trying to stuff City Hall with loyalists? Does he think this will shore up his administration? Or does he know his administration has already been widely deemed a disaster and figures he might as well help out some friends while he can?
No leader
Whatever his thinking, Mr. Gainey is keeping City Controller Rachael Heisler very busy. This week’s debacle revealed by her office was that the former city employee arrested last month for ethnic intimidation, criminal mischief and “disorderly conduct regarding an alleged antisemitic incident” was being paid $1,200 per month — possibly in violation of state law — from the city’s “purchase card program.”
Whether this was a violation of the state ethics law or just a violation of city policy is of less importance in the long run than the fact that the city operates a sizable slush fund with nothing close to reasonable oversight.
From Mayor Gainey’s refusal to accept normal, healthy media coverage to his foolish spending spree, what we see here is a “leader” who does not respect the citizens he allegedly leads.
He seems hell-bent on pushing the city into debt and disarray. We owe this man nothing.
Ruth Ann Dailey is a columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: ruthanndailey@hotmail.com.