From left to right, City Budget Director Patrick Cornell, Deputy Mayor Jake Pawlak and Press Secretary Olga George at a press conference Oct. 1. (Photo by Charlie Wolfson/Public Source)
The plan slashes $3.2 million from the mayor’s office while reducing capital spending and unfilled positions citywide.
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Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey expanded the mayor’s office staff throughout his four years in office, growing it from around 13 employees to almost 40 by creating new roles and moving other city teams into the department. Now, months before he leaves, Gainey wants to shrink the mayor’s office back down.
His 2026 budget proposal, released late Tuesday, includes some tough choices to keep the budget balanced despite stagnant revenue and rising costs. The mayor recommends eliminating some civilian police roles and cutting back on capital projects.
One of the most striking proposals: Drastic cuts in the overall funding and the number of staff allocated to the mayor’s office — cuts that would affect Gainey’s successor from day one in office.
Gainey’s spending plan would carve $3.2 million, or 64%, out of the mayor’s office budget and decrease its staff count from 39 to 16. And, in a departure from Gainey’s first three budgets, it initially included zero increase in pay for the mayor, the chief of staff or the deputy chief of staff.
Deputy Mayor Jake Pawlak said at a Wednesday press conference that the lack of a pay bump was unintended and may be a typo in the initial budget document. Shortly after the press conference the budget document on the city website was updated to show a 3% pay increase.
Pawlak said some of the 39 roles were “pruned” to help balance the budget, but others were moved back to departments where they resided before Gainey took office.
Why put things back to how they were before?
“The simple answer is we’re looking to reduce expenditures in the mayor’s office, as has been a common refrain from folks who have been critical of the budget in the past,” Pawlak said. “And it’s also consistent with past practice during these transitionary periods.”
A 16-person mayor’s office staff would be more in line with the norm before Gainey took office. The office was budgeted for between 11 and 14 staff during the last few years of the prior administration. Gainey increased the staff over the past few years, moving some formerly separate teams into the mayor’s office and expanding others.
The administration said in a Tuesday night press release that the plan includes no layoffs, but does eliminate some 50 unfilled positions across city government. The plan does not call for a tax increase, the city said.
Overall, the operating budget calls for a 2% spending increase and for the city to take in about $485,000 more than it spends next year. But after planned transfers to the Housing Opportunity Fund, capital budget, URA and Stop The Violence fund, the city would lose money next year, reducing its reserve fund by about $33 million.
The plan outlines a difficult future for city finance, forecasting property tax revenue to decline each of the next five years, and the reserve fund to shrink to less than half its 2025 level by 2030. The city could be buoyed by projected increases to income tax revenue, reflecting modest population growth over the past few years.
The proposal is the first step in a monthslong process. Gainey will formally present his budget plan to City Council in November. Council will then hold hearings with each city department director, providing members and the public some transparency into how the budgeted dollars would be spent. Council must approve a final version of the budget by the end of the year.
The budget will provide a framework for the next mayor’s first year in office. The two candidates aiming to succeed Gainey are Democrat Corey O’Connor and Republican Tony Moreno.
Similar to last year, Gainey is calling for the city to draw down its reserve fund over the next five years to balance the operating budget in the face of declining real estate tax revenue and rising costs. The rainy day fund began 2025 at $203 million and Gainey’s five-year plan puts it at $71 million at the end of 2030.
In a letter to council on Tuesday, City Controller Rachael Heisler wrote that the reliance on reserve funds to float the budget “cannot continue as a recurring revenue source.”
Pawlak said the fund balance decline is a result of property tax revenues being pushed down by a court-ordered change to how tax bills are calculated. He said a future administration may have to consider more drastic cost cuts or a tax increase to keep the fund balance from dropping below the legal minimum of 10% of annual expenses.
The police bureau would see a slight decrease in funding under Gainey’s plan. The mayor proposes no decrease to the number of uniformed officers or their pay (which is set by a union contract), but includes funding for 43 civilian employees, down from 75 in this year’s budget.
The move could represent a retreat from a key Gainey policy: shifting many police bureau jobs from sworn officers to civilian employees. In the first three budgets of his mayoral term, Gainey had gradually reduced the number of uniformed officers in the city’s yearly budget from a longtime standard of 900 to today’s 800 while increasing the number of civilian employees.
Gainey’s plan decreases capital spending from $120 million this year to $100 million next year. The capital budget includes $12.5 million in revenue from the federal Community Development Block Grant (CDBG), despite President Donald Trump’s proposal to eliminate the program. The funds are up in the air with the federal budget still under negotiation in Washington.
As it stands, the capital proposal includes a 16% decrease in paving money, a 17% decrease in engineering and construction spending, and a decrease in public safety facility funding from $19 million to $7 million.
Editor’s note: This story was updated at 11 a.m. Oct. 1 to reflect changes to the budget after publication.
Charlie Wolfson is the local government reporter for Pittsburgh’s Public Source. He can be reached at charlie@publicsource.org.
This article first appeared on Pittsburgh’s Public Source and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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