O'Connor raps rival Gainey's budget for Pittsburgh as too 'rosy'

Corey O’Connor offered a sobering assessment Thursday about the finances of the city he wants to run.

“Despite the current administration’s rosy projections, our budget is barely held together by strings and Band-Aids,” O’Connor, who wants to be mayor of Pittsburgh, told reporters during an appearance in the city’s Knoxville neighborhood.

The former city councilman and current Allegheny County controller made his point while standing on Zara Street before a tax-delinquent house with a broken window and collapsing porch.

If the city doesn’t find a way to boost revenue and spend wisely, O’Connor cautioned, it will be unable to afford the cost of demolishing dilapidated structures like the home that served as the backdrop for his remarks.

O’Connor claimed Pittsburgh is not doing enough to reverse declining revenues and ensure it can afford to fund basic city services, like paving roads and maintaining parks, in the coming years.

O’Connor’s rival in the May Democratic primary, incumbent Mayor Ed Gainey, has repeatedly assured residents that the city will weather fiscal pressures, an end to federal covid-19 relief dollars and legal challenges to a tax the city levies on out-of-town athletes and performers.

“The state of our city is strong,” Gainey said in his annual budget address in November. “For the past three years, my administration has been working hard to rebuild city government as we emerge from a dual crisis of financial distress and the covid-19 pandemic.”

In a statement Thursday, Gainey said he was glad his opponent was talking about city finances.

“Let’s talk about how I raised our city’s bond rating to AA, launched Pittsburgh’s first joint task force on city finances with City Controller (Rachael) Heisler and Finance Committee Chairperson Councilor Erika Strassburger, concluded 2024 with a $4 million budget surplus, and made sure all the federal American Rescue Plan money got out the door to the communities that needed it most,” the mayor said.

If elected, O’Connor said, he would shrink the size of the office, put more money toward helping small businesses and focus on growing the city’s tax base.

The mayor’s office has seen budgeted expenses jump this year to nearly $5 million from about $1.15 million when Gainey took office in 2022.

Part of that increase stemmed from the mayor’s office absorbing positions that were once housed in other city departments.

O’Connor said he’d cut the mayor’s communications staff, which this year is budgeted for up to six people, down from seven last year. O’Connor said he didn’t think the mayor needed so many people “putting out tweets” and argued that cash could be better spend investing in neighborhoods.

‘We must grow’

The mayor has previously defended his administration’s spending, pointing out that the city’s bond ratings, which affect its borrowing costs, remain favorable.

Gainey trimmed spending in his 2025 budget, cutting expenses for his office by 1.4%.

O’Connor argued the city needs to do more to increase revenue.

According to the 2025 budget, officials expect real estate taxes to continue going down every year over the next five years.

Largely fueling the decline is a drop in property values in Downtown, where demand for office space has waned since the pandemic ushered in a widespread move to remote work.

“We must grow,” O’Connor said. “I’m tired of losing residents and tax dollars to the suburbs.”

If elected mayor, O’Connor said, he would invest more in small businesses and encourage them to expand their presence in the city.

Pittsburgh, he said, could spend the millions it has invested in things he sees as unnecessary — like a comprehensive citywide master plan — to instead revitalize storefronts throughout the city to help businesses move in and create new jobs.

He said he also wants to attract businesses back to the Golden Triangle as opposed to the approach used by Gainey, which has focused largely on converting unused office space to affordable housing.

While O’Connor said he’d want to continue those efforts, he said not every building can easily be transformed into housing.

O’Connor talked generally about cutting red tape to make it easier to build housing and launch businesses in the city but offered no specifics.

“You should be able to open a business here and achieve your dream,” O’Connor said. “But none of that is possible if we stay on our present course toward financial chaos.”

Difference of opinion

Officials have been largely divided over how dire the city’s financial status truly is.

Gainey and Jake Pawlak, director of the Office of Management and Budget, have acknowledged money will be tight in the coming years, but they believe the city can manage without raising taxes or slashing services.

Heisler and Gainey critics, however, have struck a less optimistic tone.

They’ve warned that the city’s financial outlook appears grim and that Gainey’s cuts to overtime pay for public safety and public works personnel this year may be unrealistic — a concern the Gainey administration has rejected, arguing they’ve rolled out budget-cutting strategies to help address overtime.

The Department of Public Safety has so far spent about 35% of its annual overtime allocation, Gainey campaign spokeswoman Emilia Rowland said. The Department of Public Works has already used about 64% of its budgeted overtime for the year, she said, pointing out that it tends to burn through that budget most quickly during the winter months at the start of the year when crews are responding to snowfall.

O’Connor on Thursday also criticized Gainey’s most recent spending plan for reducing to nothing its budget for public safety equipment and small business development by 2026. The mayor’s office gives a five-year projection for its capital spending plans.

Gainey — like many mayors before him — has struggled to get the city’s major nonprofits to pay taxes or provide payments in lieu of taxes to help buoy the city’s budget.

O’Connor said his approach would center on asking nonprofits for specific essentials that free up cash for the city and help the nonprofits themselves.

He suggested asking universities or hospitals to purchase snowplows for the city because those entities benefit when students, patients and employees can safely travel on city streets to get to work, school or medical care.