Pittsburgh City Council members knew last year the city’s 2026 budget would be tight — but not how tight.
They were caught off guard last week when Mayor Corey O’Connor revealed projections of a deficit this year that could hit $40 million.
How was it possible that council — which not only voted on the budget in December but made extensive revisions — didn’t grasp the depths of the problem?
Multiple factors contributed to council’s blind spot, according to political observers and council members themselves: too few resources, a lack of detailed information from the mayor’s office, a lack of expertise and the pressure of a looming end-of-year deadline.
The end result: A hamstrung council approved a $693 million budget with a 20% property tax hike that still won’t make ends meet.
“Probably we didn’t have enough information to know that the information presented was inaccurate,” Charland said. “It was nine council members and a budget office of two people trying to dig through everything there.”
Councilman Bobby Wilson, D-North Side, felt the same way. Before council voted on the spending plan, Wilson raised concerns about contradictory information and disagreements between former Mayor Ed Gainey’s administration and council’s budget office about city finances. Council members and the city controller ripped into Gainey’s budget as dishonest and having major gaps.
“The real problem is we made all those decisions without all this information,” Wilson said.
Jake Pawlak, who led the Office of Management and Budget under Gainey, told TribLive he still believes the spending plan he crafted is realistic and responsible.
But Pittsburgh, according to its new mayor, now needs to find another $9 million for health care, $500,000 for fuel and $2.5 million for emergency bridge maintenance and boiler and roof repairs.
Faith in transparency
Peter McDevitt served as council’s budget director through the 2026 budget process and now is the city’s deputy controller. He said some information isn’t available to council’s budget office or the controller. They don’t know, for instance, when the administration is sitting on unpaid bills, he said.
Council members can call various departments for public budget meetings, but they might not know the particulars of how long it could take to fill a vacant job position or how much money a department has to spend on a specific contract.
“You just have to have faith, to a degree, that everyone is being as transparent as possible,” McDevitt said. “The council budget office wouldn’t have that information. The departments do not report to the council budget office.”
Similarly, the controller’s office can’t access the city’s budgeting software, said McDevitt’s boss, Controller Rachael Heisler, who has been vocal about budget concerns in recent years.
Make no assumptions
Now — despite council’s efforts to ensure they budgeted enough money for overtime, utilities and other expenses they feared the prior administration lowballed — officials are back to square one, as they again have to dig out of a budgetary hole, said Councilman Anthony Coghill, D-Beechview.
For Coghill, the lesson learned is that council can’t rely so heavily on the mayor to take charge in budgeting or even to ensure bills are being paid.
“Perhaps council needs to reevaluate and take a deep look at all our expenses and not assume that any mayor is funding these things,” Coghill said.
When council went back to the drawing board with the budget last year, they faced a tall task. While the administration has a sizable budget office that spends months crafting an initial version of the spending plan, council’s budget office is a two-person crew.
The mayor must present a preliminary budget proposal by the end of September and a formal budget address in November.
By the time the mayor sends his budget proposal to council, they have less than two months until the end-of-year-deadline to pass a balanced spending plan.
Council members scrambled to make changes. McDevitt outlined a grim buffet of possibilities, from various tax hikes to a slew of cuts. Council ultimately approved the budget at the conclusion of a rare weekend session.
Upper hand
It’s not unusual that council members would rely largely on information provided by the mayor and his staff, said Lonce Bailey, a Shippensburg University professor with expertise in public budgeting.
“The fact is that the executive branch has a substantial upper hand over budgets, certainly in budget battles and in information,” he said.
He pointed to the discrepancy in the sizes of their staffs — 30 full-time workers in the mayor’s Office of Management and Budget versus two in council’s budget office — as a clear example of why council wouldn’t have the capacity for in-depth audits.
“They’re legislators, not administrators,” Bailey said. “Council members can only act on what’s brought to them. And a lot of it is so technical that many council members don’t have the expertise or the time or the staffing to actually check. You’re sort of relying on the technical expertise. This is a problem in all bureaucracies.”
No granular information
Michael Strelic, who served as council’s budget manager until spring 2022 and now is Ligonier Township’s manager, said it was not uncommon for the budget to be a bit off from reality. The fire bureau’s overtime costs might exceed the budget by a couple of million dollars, he said, or a few smaller bills might not be paid until the next budget year.
But the kinds of issues officials are describing now — like a $10 million water bill sitting unpaid or a budget hole of up to $40 million — seem to him to be atypical.
Strelic said that during his time with council, there was often fairly detailed information, but not the most in-depth explanations of how the administration came up with its numbers.
“The granular information was provided but the reasoning behind that information was not always provided,” he said.
Strelic recalled, for example, council would get dollar figures for health care budgets but no details about how those numbers were derived or whether assumptions, say about the number of an employee’s dependents, aligned with reality.
“Come December, when it’s crunch time and they’re looking to scrape together $20 million, you don’t have time for some of that analysis that would be nice to do,” he told TribLive.
Filling budget holes is also a tricky business, Strelic said. It requires the kind of tough decisions — like closing pools and recreation centers or scrapping paving projects — that officials aren’t eager to make.
Seeking more transparency
Councilwoman Erika Strassburger, D-Squirrel Hill, said council simply wasn’t aware of certain issues, like the city needing money for a retiree health care trust fund.
“That’s not something I think we would’ve known to catch. The budget’s very complicated,” said Strassburger, who serves as council’s finance chair. “When something’s missing, unless you’re overly familiar with that particular line item, you’re not going to know to look for it.”
The result is a reliance on the mayor’s administration to share pertinent details. Council, the North Side’s Wilson said, needs to be “better at catching” discrepancies.
Wilson suggested a range of ideas including better training for council members to hiring an independent firm to help analyze the spending plan. He also wants to see more detailed breakdowns of each line item in the budget available for council members and the public.
“I think there could be more transparency,” Wilson said.
Not so simple
Chris Borick, a political science professor at Muhlenberg College, said it’s not unusual for officials to disagree over budget figures or become bogged down by bad budget projections.
On the federal level, he pointed out, the president and Congress have separate budget offices. They don’t always argee either.
“What Pittsburgh’s going through is not all that uncommon in terms of municipal finance,” he said, though he acknowledged it could be “particularly challenging given the scope the mayor reported.”
“The elected officials rely on the estimates they’re given,” he said. “Sometimes they’re filtered through a partisan lens in terms of acceptance or skepticism. But ultimately, those projections that come from budget offices do have an impact on what’s decided.”
Borick also acknowledged that municipal budgets aren’t as simple as basic addition and subtraction. Revenues and expenses change year to year based on a number of factors, some of which are impossible to predict for certain and are beyond the city’s control.
“People might say, ‘This is simple. It’s just accounting,’ ” Borick said. “It’s accounting with a lot of moving parts.”
Strong-mayor system
Joseph Sabino Mistick, who served as deputy mayor under former Mayor Sophie Masloff, criticized recent mayors for not taking a more proactive approach in addressing budget problems, from managing overtime expenses to more routinely upgrading vehicles.
“They’ve showed little interest in governing in terms of addressing the day-to-day needs of the city,” Mistick said.
Pittsburgh, Mistick said, has a “strong-mayor form of government.” That doesn’t necessarily put City Council in the best position to make budget decisions.
“You rely on a mayor to not only be strong but to be forthright,” he said. “When you get an administration that is not as open and forthright as they should be, it is possible that there would be things that council should know about that council does not know about.”
Mistick said council may want to take a more pointed approach to questioning officials during budget hearings in the future.
Sal Sirabella, former Mayor Tom Murphy’s deputy, said budget issues should have been communicated during the transition between the Gainey and O’Connor administrations.
He said he understood the controller and council may have had limited information but suggested council should’ve “dug a little deeper.”
“I don’t know how that falls through the cracks,” Sirabella said.
Bring in the cooks
O’Connor said his administration will formally reopen the budget next week. He did not offer details about what kind of changes he will propose but suggested he’ll focus on more conservative trims. He told reporters he was not anticipating another tax increase, layoffs or drastic cuts to city services.
Any budget amendments will require approval from City Council.
Councilwoman Deb Gross, D-Highland Park, said she’s glad officials are again scrutinizing the city’s spending as additional information comes to light.
“This is a case where you do want more eyes on the information,” she said.
“Sometimes there can be too many cooks in the kitchen. I don’t feel that is this situation. I think we need more cooks in the kitchen. We need more information and more eyes on it. I think no one should feel bad that we’re taking a second look at it. I think it’s good that we are.”