ALLEGHENY COUNTY EXECUTIVE RICH FITZGERALD, left, speaks at a candidate forum, Oct. 14, as his opponent, Matt Drozd, looks on. (Photo by J.L. Martello)
by Rob Taylor Jr. , Courier Staff Writer
Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald pulled out all the stops Monday night, Oct. 14, pertaining to his methods of improving economic opportunities for African Americans in the Pittsburgh area.
“I’ve had almost 4,000 hires since I’ve been county executive—25 percent of those individuals have been African Americans and 28 percent have been people of color, and that’s in a population base of 13 percent, so almost double the hires,” he said at a candidate forum held at CCAC. The forum was sponsored by the League of Women Voters of Greater Pittsburgh, ACLU of Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh United, and the Black Political Empowerment Project.
“Working with Tim Stevens (president and CEO of B-PEP), we created the very first Corporate Equity and Inclusion Roundtable in which we bring corporate Pittsburgh, our biggest suppliers, our biggest corporations to the table to make sure that we’re including people at all levels,” Fitzgerald touted to the crowd.
“I’ve also worked with Evan Frazier of Highmark, who started a new program called TALI (The Advanced Leadership Initiative’s Executive Leadership Academy) with CMU (Carnegie Mellon University), and that is to create a pipeline for C-Suite and executive positions for people of color,” Fitzgerald continued. “We’ve gotta continue to move forward in that area, and I will use all the strength of my office to be able to do that.”
But Fitzgerald’s counterpart, Republican Matt Drozd, a former Allegheny County Councilman, said that he’s the one that has been in many inner-city communities of Allegheny County, and he knows firsthand that many African Americans across the county are still struggling.
“When we had 200,000 more population in Allegheny County, we had 400 prisoners—now we have 200,000 less population, and we got 2,800 prisoners—85 percent of them (for) drug and alcohol, 60 percent come back and do it again, and a lot of them are young people, and African Americans,” Drozd said. “When they come out of there, they get no rehabilitation. We aren’t doing anything to rehabilitate those people. No one’s done anything about it since I’ve been talking about it since all my time in Council.”
With several other candidates in other races not showing up to the forum, the stage belonged entirely to Fitzgerald and Drozd, one of which will be victorious in the race for Allegheny County Executive on Election Day, Nov. 5. Fitzgerald is the Democratic incumbent, a position he’s held for eight years, and wants four more at the helm. Drozd, the Republican County Councilman from 2005 to 2013, launched his campaign in March, calling himself a “moderate, a fiscal conservative,” during an interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
When forum moderator Jessica Lynch (a League of Women Voters member) introduced a question about keeping longtime residents in neighborhoods that are experiencing increasing housing prices, Drozd blamed the situation on a lack of an “impact study” that failed to take into consideration how increasing prices could hurt the existing community residents.
“When I was on County Council, we didn’t do one impact study,” Drozd said, inferring that he was in favor of the study but Democrats had the majority of votes in Council at the time. “All they did was come with developments to us, and they said, ‘this is what we want to do.’ But no one took into consideration what was happening in those inner cities. We should have done impact studies. Neighborhoods are most important when you do any development.”
Fitzgerald said he’s fought to make sure developers designate at least 10, possibly 20 percent of housing as “affordable,” particularly in Lawrenceville, Garfield, East Liberty, Millvale and Homestead. Fitzgerald said those areas “are starting to see escalation in (housing) prices. We want to have a Pittsburgh that’s a Pittsburgh and an Allegheny County for everybody.”
Later in the evening, Drozd held in his hand a published report which said, according to Drozd, that women and minorities had received just 2.5 percent of county contracts. An obvious shot to Fitzgerald, the current county executive rebutted with his own numbers, in which he touted that, among others, “24 percent went to minority and women owned businesses for ALCOSAN, Port Authority was 14 percent, and for the Sports Exhibition Authority, 31 percent of the contracts went to minority and women-owned businesses.”
In front of an audience that remained silent and neutral throughout the forum, Fitzgerald also mentioned that he was “proud to appoint the very first African American public defender in Allegheny County (Elliot Howsie)…I’m proud of the fact that Elliot…was (later) appointed to be a judge in the Court of Common Pleas.”
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