Allegheny County Council overrides Fitzgerald veto, enacts county-worker minimum wage

Allegheny County employees will have a new minimum wage starting next year and that wage will eventually increase to $20 an hour.

The law will set $20 an hour as the minimum wage for county workers by 2026. There would be incremental increases to $18 an hour next year and to $19 an hour in 2025.

Allegheny County Council first passed the bill earlier this month on a 10-4 vote, but Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald vetoed. He said it would violate the county’s Home Rule Charter and that the wage increases would lead to tax increase.

On Tuesday, council overrode Fitzgerald’s veto on a 10-5 vote. Ten votes is the minimum number required to override a veto.

This was the second time a Fitzgerald veto was successfully overridden by council. Council overrode a veto last year to enact a fracking ban in county-owned parks.

Fitzgerald said Tuesday that his office might be considering a legal challenge.

Allegheny County Council President Pat Catena, D-Carnegie, said the wage increase is needed to help county workers, particular those who have children, and he hopes this law will help. He said a couple with two children each needs to make $23 an hour to support their family in Allegheny County, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Living Wage Calculator.

In a statement following the override vote, Fitzgerald said his opposition to the council legislation doesn’t mean he opposes raising workers’ wages. Rather, he said his administration thinks council does not have the legal power to set wages.

“Ultimately, my veto was about the separation of powers set up in the county’s Home Rule Charter,” he said. “Tonight’s vote to override my veto doesn’t do anything to address that conflict.”

The Allegheny County solicitor and the county council’s solicitor have diverging opinions on the minimum wage bill. The county solicitor’s opinion said county council does not have the legal authority to install a minimum wage, while the county council solicitor’s opinion said the body does.

Council was largely in support of the bill. Ten Democrats voted to override Fitzgerald’s veto, saying the county needed to boost minimum wages to help families make ends meet and help the county retain workers and attract new ones to address the 1,600 vacancies that exist across county government.

Two Republicans and three Democrats voted against the override.

Councilwoman Suzanne Filiaggi, R-Franklin Park, voted against the bill and said she expects legal challenges to the law.

“We will be spending more taxpayer dollars defending the inevitable suit,” she said.

The three Democratic council members who voted against the veto override — Councilmen Nick Futules, Bob Macey and DeWitt Walton — said they had concerns that union members would oppose the bill and that labor bargaining should just be between union members and the county.

Macey, D-West Mifflin, said he supports people getting higher wages, but said if county workers “are not satisfied here, maybe you need to move on.”

However, unions like LiUNA have come out in support of the minimum wage bill. LiUNA represents more than 1,000 Allegheny County government employees.

Some in opposition to the bill disagreed that part-time workers such as lifeguards and concession stand employees should be making $20 an hour. Councilman Sam DeMarco, R-North Fayette, said he was concerned about wage compression issues and the potential $30 million cost of the wage increase.

Councilwoman Bethany Hallam, D-Brighton Heights, voted in favor of the override and said the bill will boost many full-time workers, not just part-time employees. She said that $20 an hour is equivalent to a salary of $41,600 a year and even that wouldn’t represent a living wage for a single person with a child.

“We are talking about people who have been working at the county for decades who are not making that wage,” she said.

Catena criticized Fitzgerald’s opposition and said there were many places in the county’s $1 billion operating budget to fund wage increases for lower-paid workers. He noted that the executive had increased wages for top executives last year and that millions of dollars could be saved if overtime issues at Allegheny County Jail were addressed.

“I cannot and I will not ever support subsidizing our operating budget by underpaying our employees,” Catena said.

Councilman Tom Duerr, D-Bethel Park, voted to override the veto and said that it was a normal function of government to do so. He said he appreciated the executive’s stance, but that council should support the wage increase.

“Sometimes different bodies disagree,” Duerr said. “This is how this works. If you support this the first time, I don’t know what would have changed this going into the vote tonight.”

No votes changed between the initial vote and the override, with the exception of Filiaggi, who was absent for the first vote.