Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey at his desk in his City-County Building offices, Monday, Oct. 24, 2022, in downtown Pittsburgh. (Photo by Stephanie Strasburg/PublicSource)
Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey reiterated his major campaign pledges while acknowledging the constraints of office during a ranging interview with PublicSource staff.
by Charlie Wolfson, PublicSource
Mayor Ed Gainey is approaching the halfway point of his first term leading Pittsburgh and preparing to deliver his second budget proposal to City Council in two weeks. Two years in, stabilizing and reforming the police force and reaping more revenue from major nonprofits remain high on his agenda.
Both areas have bedeviled Pittsburgh mayors for decades, and both are issues Gainey claimed he would master during his 2021 campaign. An initial draft of his 2024 budget shows how he is trying to reshape city government — but also illustrates how far he has yet to go on two signature campaign promises.
His budget calls for fewer positions in the Bureau of Police — an open acknowledgment that police staffing continues to lag the administration’s stated goal of 900 uniformed officers, and that they don’t expect to hit that goal anytime soon.
On the revenue side, the budget also lacks significant payments in lieu of taxes [PILOTs] from major nonprofits, such as UPMC, the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University and Allegheny Health Network [AHN]. This is not unusual — mayors have struggled for decades to extract more money from major owners of tax-exempt property — and it’s still uncertain whether the administration’s strategy to reap more revenue from tax-exempt properties will yield big results.
UPMC: playing fair?
Gainey campaigned passionately on getting UPMC to pay its “fair share” to the city in 2021. In an hour-long Oct. 17 interview with PublicSource in his office suite, he reiterated that goal while acknowledging an impasse with the nonprofit’s leadership.
“Let’s talk about the fact that you can’t have a city that’s for all, or a quality city, if you have nonprofits that own so much real estate and not pay taxes,” Gainey said. “Let’s talk about the fact that through decades and decades and decades of building an empire on those tax subsidies that you got to help you build your empire, don’t you think it’s time to give back without raising taxes on the residents?
“I can’t understand why billions can’t pay a little bit.”
Paul Wood, UPMC’s chief communications officer, wrote in an email to PublicSource that Gainey is “aware of UPMC’s ongoing support of various initiatives and can count on our full participation in programs that are fair and equitable and include the region’s other major nonprofits.”
He listed numerous community investments from UPMC, including funding the Pittsburgh Promise, providing medical care at a Downtown homeless shelter and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of charity care.
Police: defunding or defending?
Gainey launched his campaign in early 2021 when calls for police reform ran hot from the 2020 protests of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police. He made police reform — though not defunding — a key campaign issue. This month, he said he’s often misunderstood on the subject as Pittsburgh’s first Black mayor.
“You know, I’m supposed to be the Black mayor that’s going to defund the police,” Gainey said.
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