Bob Palmosina watched nervously as his colleagues on Allegheny County Council cast their votes Dec 3.

For weeks, Palmosina, a Democrat from Banksville, had worked feverishly to cobble together a workable budget deal.

Council and County Executive Sara Innamorato were locked in a stalemate over her proposed $3.1 billion spending plan for next year.

Its most radioactive provision: a 46.5% property tax increase, which would be the county’s first in more than a decade.

Everyone knew that one way or another, property taxes would have to go up in order to stave off a looming deficit and keep essential services churning for the county’s 1.2 million residents.

But no one could agree on how much.

Number crunchers warned that if something wasn’t done, the county would face a $133 million shortfall in the coming years.

That could mean layoffs, drastic reductions and potential disaster for parks, police, nursing homes, row offices and more.

Council’s 15 members had split into factions, each group lobbying for its own budget priorities and a tax hike smaller than what Innamorato wanted.

With the county’s leaders at odds, this budget season had become the most contentious and vexing of council’s 24-year history.

Hanging over both sides: an early December deadline to pass a spending plan or risk the courts taking over the process.

To avoid that, Palmosina had tasked himself with getting a deal pushed through. He was, after all, head of council’s budget committee.

As council members began voting one by one in the Gold Room of the Allegheny County Courthouse, Palmosina could do nothing more than watch and hope.

He had no idea how things were going to turn out.

The mood shifts

Innamorato initially proposed an increase of 2.2 mills, which would tack on another $182 per year to a home assessed at the county’s median value.

She gave council members a sneak peek on Oct. 7, the day before she announced her proposal publicly.

During that meeting, the atmosphere was cordial as members listened to Innamorato and her staff detail the county’s fiscal challenges.

The county has been running budget deficits since 2021, she explained. It had filled those gaps with federal pandemic aid and by drawing from the county’s reserve fund.

But federal aid was expiring at the end of this year, she cautioned. And the rainy day fund would be depleted within a couple of years, leaving the county unable to weather any future economic downturn or major unexpected expenses.

Declining funds from sales taxes and higher than expected tax refunds were also cutting into the county’s revenue streams.

After that meeting, Innamorato said she was confident there was support for her proposal.

Later that day, her suggested tax hike was leaked to the media. One outlet trumpeted that it was the largest in county history.

It wasn’t. County property taxes had gone up by more at least a half-dozen times dating to 1978.

But the damage was done.

Innamorato said she noticed an immediate change in some council members’ moods.

Things only got worse when details of the tax hike were widely reported. Calls flooded Innamorato’s office — some in favor of her plan, many against.

Councilman David Bonaroti, a Democrat from Lawrenceville, said he received 75 phone calls and 700 emails. He said many opposed the increase.

Franklin Park Republican Councilwoman Suzanne Filiaggi was keeping tabs, too. She said she was deluged by calls. For every resident in favor of Innamorato’s plan, she said, 10 residents were opposed.

With the news about what Innamorato wanted having circulated throughout the county, Palmosina said no more than five council members supported it.

That was far short of the two-thirds majority, or 10 votes, needed for passage.

Bonaroti was opposed, and in late October he and other like-minded members met with Innamorato’s budget director, Tim Cox, to discuss the budget deficit.

Council President Patrick Catena, a Democrat from Carnegie, requested from the administration details about how a 1-mill tax increase — less than half what Innamorato sought — would impact the budget, according to Councilman Nick Futules, D-Oakmont.

Catena did not respond to requests for an interview for this story.

PR blitz

On Nov. 8, county Manager John Fournier conjured a nightmare scenario.

If council passed a budget with only a 1-mill tax hike, he warned in a letter, the county would be forced to close all four of its pools; eliminate after-school programs for thousands of children; and lay off hundreds of workers, including police officers, 911 dispatchers, health care professionals, park rangers and snowplow drivers.

The next week, Innamorato launched a public relations campaign for her spending plan. She held press conferences across the county pitching her budget as one that boosted economic growth, maintained public safety initiatives and senior care, and tackled homelessness.

She and her staff worked the phones, trying to calm residents and worried homeowners. Innamorato’s team explained that property taxes would go up about $15 a month for the median homeowner. They talked about the importance of the services and amenities the county provides.

Innamorato said she felt that people were starting to come around to her position.

“We were at a little bit of a public-knowledge deficit, people didn’t understand yet how the tax increase would impact them,” she said.

Meanwhile, a group of council members that included Bonaroti, Catena, Filiaggi and Sam DeMarco, chair of the county’s Republican Party, began to work with Palmosina on a counter to Innamorato’s budget proposal, which seemed dead in the water.

They wanted to see austerity measures since residents had already been hit with price increases due to inflation.

Bonaroti, 37, a consultant who has worked on business development at Google and other local tech companies, spent long nights in his living room staring at his ceiling and walls, contemplating how to craft a viable proposal.

“I would just be staring at the bricks in my house thinking about it, and my wife is like, ‘Why are you staring at the ceiling that like?’ ” he said. “I was just putting in a lot of hours.”

Like his colleagues on council, he was a part-time legislator with limited experience crafting multibillion-dollar budgets.

On Nov. 26, the group of council members presented their plan at a budget committee meeting.

Their proposed tax increase: 1.35 mills, compared to the 2.2 mills advanced by Innamorato.

Council members Jack Betkowski, D-Ross, and Bethany Hallam, D-North Side, rejected the pitch. They didn’t like how it stripped out certain funding in Innamorato’s initial proposal and criticized what they saw as a lack of transparency, since the proposal was not shown to all the members until the meeting.

Despite their complaints, the proposal cleared the committee by 5-4 vote. It remained unclear, however, if it could pass the full council.

According to Futules, nine members supported the plan — one shy of the magic number.

In less than a week, council would have to vote. If a budget wasn’t passed by Dec. 6, the process would be handed to a judge and taken out of legislators’ hands.

Neither faction was budging.

Unlikely negotiator

Palmosina, a 61-year-old retiree, spent most of his career working for Pittsburgh’s public works department, picking up trash, clearing snow and making repairs.

He has been relatively quiet in his six years on council. No controversy, few headlines.

The last two months spent trying to wrangle votes was hardly in his wheelhouse, but he felt called to the work.

As chair of council’s budget committee, he was thrust into the role of chief negotiator.

“It kind of just fell in my lap,” said Palmosina.

Palmosina didn’t shy away. But he had little to go on.

This was Palmosina’s moment.

When he noticed Innamorato and the bipartisan group of council members were both stuck in their camps, he acted.

“I was worried where this was going. If it didn’t get settled, what truly would happen? Because nobody really seemed to know how this would have played out.”

Palmosina was reluctant to raise people’s taxes too high. Ultimately, though, he found himself thinking about the unpleasant potential of cuts to the county’s service programs like the Kane senior centers or after-school childcare.

Defaulting on the vote was untenable for him personally. Palmosina felt it wouldn’t be appropriate for council to shirk its main responsibility and leave the budget to the court’s whims.

How a judge might rule was anyone’s guess. Palmosina said the end result could have been no tax increase — spurring massive county employee layoffs and service cuts — or a tax increase even higher than what Innamorato proposed, costing homeowners hundreds of dollars a year.

Palmosina made dozens of phone calls in the last several weeks to try to strike some compromise between county government’s warring factions.

Though Bonorati came down on a different side of the budget battle, he said he respected how Palmosina navigated the situation.

“I have all the respect in the world for him,” Bonaroti said. “He had to balance the votes, and he had to go to Innamorato and her team. It fell on him.”

Palmosina said he was driven by his own experience growing up in Pittsburgh’s Westwood neighborhood.

He was the youngest of seven siblings, raised by a single mom after his father died when Palmosina was 5. When he was young, he and his siblings found work through the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, a federal program that provided job training and work to low-income people.

Palmosina said he benefited greatly from these types of programs and he recognized that the county’s Department of Human Services provides similar benefits.

“That’s where I learned all about hard work,” Palmosina said. “I learned about getting up every day and going to work and providing for my family. I do know people are struggling, but these programs, they help people, they help people in need.”

That experience formed the backbone of Palmosina’s desire to reach a compromise: to ensure that taxes were raised as little as they could, but that also county services and service providers did not see cuts.

“We are all told that if you vote to raise taxes, you’re basically done,” Palmosina said. “Well, I did vote for it because I thought I had to do what’s best for the people of Allegheny County, for the people that need these programs.”

Last-minute deal

After the Nov. 26 meeting, Palmosina said he presented the 1.35-mill proposal to Innamorato and her staff. He said he reached out to the district attorney’s office, the county sheriff’s office and the courts.

They told Palmosina that the proposal would trigger layoffs.

“All three of them were honest,” he said.

On Monday morning Dec. 2, the day before council was scheduled to vote, Palmosina, Innamorato and Catena gathered in a second-floor conference room at the Allegheny County Courthouse.

It was a no-nonsense meeting. Catena and Palmosina sat at a U-shaped table in the windowless room as Innamorato’s budget director walked them through spreadsheets of numbers. The options on the table seemed either too high or too low.

Then the county executive, standing before a whiteboard, addressed the two men.

She told them she could back off her original proposal and limit a tax increase to 1.8 mills.

Palmosina replied that he needed 1.7 mills to get to 10 votes.

In the morning, Palmosina called Innamorato, and said that he was just shy of the 10 votes needed.

Innamorato contacted one of the holdouts, Betkowksi, the Ross Democrat. She said he originally supported her initial proposal, but she convinced him to back the compromise plan.

Her office also reached out to the other holdout, Councilman DeWitt Walton, D-Hill District.

Walton told TribLive that he was never on board for council’s counterproposal of 1.35 mills or Innamorato’s 2.2-mill plan.

“We needed an increase in revenue but not that steep,” Walton said.

He said he shared his concerns with Palmosina after the Nov. 26 budget committee meeting.

Walton said he would have preferred taxes go up by 1.5 or 1.6 mills, but ultimately urgency drove him to accept 1.7.

With Walton and Betkowski on board, Innamorato had reached 10 votes by her count.

Palmosina and Futules weren’t as sure.

The vote arrives

In the hours after the meeting with Catena and Innamorato, Palmosina whipped votes.

Even with 13 Democrats on council, he didn’t know if he could persuade enough people to back the compromise plan.

He said he knew five members were against it, and eight were in favor. Two council members, he said, wouldn’t tell him how they were voting.

“I wasn’t sure if I was going to have 10 that night,” Palmosina said last week. “I thought I was going to have it, but when people were talking before the vote, you’re trying to figure out which way they’re going.”

On the morning of the vote, Innamorato made a public announcement that caught everyone off guard: She proclaimed that she and council had struck a deal that would raise property taxes by 1.7 mills, or 36%.

Innamorato would have to wait until that evening to see if council members would come through or make a liar out of her.

Going into the vote, Palmosina was a bundle of nerves.

As the proceedings kicked off, he listened to each member’s speech, trying to determine how they would come down. Some said how they intended to vote, others didn’t.

“It was back and forth, and we didn’t know what they were going to do,” Futules said.

The holdouts came through. Palmosina and Futules voted in favor. Catena and the other backers of the lower tax rate formed the five-member bloc of no votes.

Only when the roll call came, and the 10th and final yes vote was announced, did Palmosina know the work was done.

Two whirlwind months of public lobbying, late nights and shuttle diplomacy had paid off. Palmosina’s patience, persistence and a personal touch pushed the budget deal over the finish line.

Perhaps Futules summed it up best.

“Basically, it was a game of chicken,” he said. “They got it at the last second.”

One last task

Despite his success, Palmosina was left with mixed emotions.

He felt bad for raising people’s taxes during a period of already high prices.

But he was also flooded with relief that the county avoided layoffs like the kind he suffered a decade ago when he got cut from his 30-year tenure in Pittsburgh’s public works department. He said he wouldn’t wish that on anyone.

“It was in the best interest for everybody that I could find some kind of common ground and try to help everybody and try to ease the pain on all ends of it,” Palmosina said.

After the vote, Palmosina’s work finding the middle ground wasn’t finished.

Palmosina said one of his constituents in Scott left him an angry voicemail, upset about his support for raising property taxes and saying he would never again back the councilman.

Palmosina called him back, as he does most constituents, and told him he understood and respected his anger.

He spent the next 15 minutes explaining his vote — how the county must raise revenue to match costs driven by inflation and ensure its senior care centers and public safety divisions don’t see layoffs.

In Palmosina’s telling, the constituent reversed course and rewarded the councilman’s effort.

“We had a really nice conversation, and I was shocked because at the end of it he said, ‘I am not happy with this, but I am shocked that you called me, and I will vote for you,’ ” Palmosina recalled.

“I didn’t expect that and that wasn’t why I called him back. I just wanted to let him vent on me. I know people need to get that off their chests.”

Copyright ©2025— Trib Total Media, LLC (TribLIVE.com)