Editor’s note: On Sunday, TribLive profiled the policy positions of the two Democrats running in the May 20 primary election for Pittsburgh’s mayor. Here, we look at the two candidates in the Republican primary.
Pittsburgh hasn’t elected a Republican mayor in about 100 years, but the candidates competing for the GOP nomination are hoping to buck that losing trend.
Tony Moreno, a retired police officer, and Thomas West, a small-business owner, portray themselves as political outsiders with fresh perspectives who could bring real change to a city long led by Democrats.
Moreno, 56, of Brighton Heights, spent 24 years as a Pittsburgh police officer. In 2021, he came in third in the Democratic mayoral primary behind Ed Gainey, the city’s current mayor, and Bill Peduto, who was the incumbent. Moreno then ran as a Republican in the general election, losing to Gainey.
West, 48, of Highland Park, owns a men’s clothing store in Lawrenceville. He previously worked as a TV news producer for WPXI and WTAE.
Here’s where the Republican candidates stand on major issues:
Public safety
Moreno, an Army veteran, wants to recruit people from local colleges and with military experience for the police bureau. He said hiring for the force — which has lost more officers to resignation and retirement than it can recruit — should be a top priority.
He wants to eliminate what he sees as favoritism in promotions and standardize the process as a way to improve morale and retention.
Moreno said he would seek to promote to chief someone on the city’s force or a former Pittsburgh police officer.
He advocated for expanding the Office of Community Health and Safety, which sends social workers to some police calls.
West said his first priority would be hiring a chief, someone who has earned the community’s trust and the force’s respect. He said he prefers to choose from within the bureau but said he wouldn’t reject going outside.
Under the Gainey administration, there have been five people in the top cop spot — two of whom have resigned since October.
West said he, too, would focus on bolstering recruitment and retention efforts. Increased staffing, he said, would give officers better work-life balance, which should improve morale.
“Police officers are stretched too thin right now,” he said.
Because officers no longer have to live within city limits, West said, he feels an extra emphasis on building relationships with the communities they serve is essential.
He said he would defer to a new police chief to tell him what role the Office of Community Health and Safety should play in the city’s public safety efforts.
Homelessness
Moreno said he wants more police intervention in homeless camps and stricter enforcement there of drug laws.
“It aggravates me to no end our city allows people to live this way,” he said.
Providing more access to mental health help, Moreno said, also would be central to his approach.
Moreno believes people living on the streets would be more likely to accept offers of indoor shelter if law enforcement had a stronger presence.
West said he would take a “tough love” approach to homelessness, telling people they cannot continue to live outside.
He said he would follow the existing protocol used by the city and Allegheny County that officials must be able to offer indoor shelter before closing down a camp. He added, however, he wants to do more to ensure people aren’t permitted to live outside in what he dubbed “crime havens.”
“I don’t know if criminalization is the word to use for it, but you can’t let (camps) exist because it’s not healthy for anybody,” West said.
Affordable housing
Moreno said Gainey’s proposal to force all large-scale housing developments to earmark some units as affordable housing is going about it “all wrong.”
“It allows the government to control how our communities grow or are formed,” he said of the inclusionary zoning bill being considered.
Moreno doesn’t like how government bases affordability on area median income, which factors in wealthy suburbs. He said he’d scrap the existing models for creating affordable housing and instead take a neighborhood-by-neighborhood approach to determine what would be considered truly affordable for working-class people in each community.
Featured Local Businesses
West argued the city gets in the way of creating affordable housing, citing regulatory barriers and a permitting process many have long complained is slow and cumbersome.
He said he wants to see more housing built for people of all incomes.
West also rebuffed Gainey’s proposal for citywide inclusionary zoning and, like Moreno, argued for a neighborhood-by-neighborhood approach.
City finances
Moreno and West both oppose tax hikes, even as the city faces declining revenues and fiscal belt-tightening.
Moreno criticized a $6 million city master plan commissioned under Gainey and $80,000 spent in 2022 on a national search to find a police chief who lasted 18 months.
Moreno said he believes there’s waste to cut. He argued the city missed an opportunity to make long-term investments in city infrastructure and equipment with federal covid-19 relief money.
West pointed out that the Democratic candidates for mayor — Gainey and his challenger, Corey O’Connor, the Allegheny County controller and a former city councilman — have been involved in Pittsburgh budgets in recent years but can’t agree on how dire the financial situation is. Gainey has said he believes the city is in a strong financial position, while O’Connor has warned the city is struggling to stay afloat.
“I personally believe we’re facing Act 47 coming up in the not-too-distant future,” West said, referring to the state statute governing financially distressed communities.
Pittsburgh had operated under the Municipalities Financial Recovery Act, known as Act 47, from December 2003 until 2018. The city had grappled with chronic deficits, overwhelming debt and mounting employee pension costs that nearly pushed it into bankruptcy and tanked its credit rating.
West said he wants to focus on growing the city, encouraging families and businesses to move to or stay in Pittsburgh.
As a small-business owner, West feels leaders often ignore the business community’s needs.
When Pittsburgh implemented a plastic bag ban, he said, it left many business owners confused and frustrated — and sometimes with massive stockpiles of illegal plastic bags. The bill O’Connor wrote as a councilman that required businesses in the city to give businesses paid sick days, West said, created extra financial burdens for small businesses — but city leaders never talked to people like him about how they could “lessen the impact.”
Being more supportive of businesses, he said, could help the city grow its tax base.
Nonprofits
City leaders have long struggled to persuade Pittsburgh’s major nonprofits — including hospitals and universities — to provide payments in lieu of taxes.
Moreno said he believes nonprofits are reluctant to chip in to the general fund because they can’t control where their cash is spent. He wants to make specific requests, like asking hospitals to contribute to city employees’ health insurance or sponsor child care training centers.
To encourage nonprofits to participate, he said, he would work with their leaders to craft a matrix that ensures all nonprofits pay a fair amount based on their size.
West said city leaders too often attack nonprofits. He’d aim to strike a friendlier tone to entice them to make a long-term payment deal with the city, promising transparency and accountability with their money.
“I think we would get more for our buck if we would go to them and say, ‘Let’s work together, let’s get this done,’ ” he said.
West said he was skeptical of the city’s ongoing legal challenges to nonprofits’ tax exempt status.
Infrastructure
Infrastructure problems in the city sit unaddressed for too long, Moreno said, pointing to the Fern Hollow Bridge collapse in January 2022 as the prime example.
Though Gainey has created a new bridge maintenance division, Moreno said he wants to better prioritize the budget to allocate even more funding for bridge and road maintenance.
West said the city should work to grow its revenues by encouraging more businesses to open and expand in the city so Pittsburgh doesn’t have to rely as heavily on state and federal dollars, which often prop up significant portions of infrastructure projects.
“Part of the issue is the budget priorities are out of whack,” West said, explaining he feels funding bridge maintenance and key infrastructure projects should be among the top considerations when crafting a budget. “It’s ridiculous we had a bridge collapse.”
Downtown
Moreno, who used to patrol Downtown Pittsburgh, said he believes safety is the key to attracting businesses and visitors to Downtown. He called for a larger police presence and additional cleanup efforts.
Featured Local Businesses
Though a $600 million Downtown revitalization effort is focused, in part, on making Downtown into more of a residential neighborhood, Moreno believes the focus should remain on attracting businesses.
“It’s not a neighborhood,” he said. “It’s called the business district.”
If more businesses were to bring employees back to the offices many left during the pandemic, workers could support the restaurants and Cultural District, Moreno said.
West, too, said he wants a larger police presence Downtown. He also wants to keep homeless camps out of the area and launch beautification projects.
“You can throw as much money as you want at a neighborhood, but if you are not safe in that neighborhood or you don’t perceive yourself to be safe in that neighborhood, it’s not going to work,” he said.
West said he doesn’t think all the Golden Triangle’s skyscrapers could be easily converted to apartments, referencing ongoing efforts championed by Gainey to create affordable housing in empty office space. Some, he said, should be reserved as incubators for small businesses.
Core services
Moreno said he wants to spend more on core city services, arguing there’s money in the budget that could be moved around to better support road paving, snowplows and infrastructure improvements.
He advocated asking residents what they want to prioritize.
“They’re spending money on things they don’t need while the things that need fixed get ignored,” Moreno said, citing as an example the $6 million citywide master plan Gainey launched.
West said the city’s core functions are ensuring public safety and maintaining infrastructure — so that’s what the budget should prioritize.
Like Moreno, he believes he could more efficiently use the city’s budget to find additional funding to improve core services.
“The city is not prioritizing the budget correctly,” West said, though he didn’t specify what changes he would make.