Can a city truly go broke? Controller Rachael Heisler has been sounding the alarm on Pittsburgh’s “unsustainable” budget for months — too much overtime, no more savings, and a nationwide “ARPA hangover” as pandemic-era aid runs out.
It’s happened before: In 2003, City Council voted to let the state take over our budget through a process called Act 47, which ended in 2018. Are we headed there again? Heisler joined City Cast Pittsburgh’s Megan Harris to talk about what’s gone wrong, what solutions may be on the horizon, and what all this means for everyone who lives here.
Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Can Pittsburgh go broke?
I don’t know. To me, the biggest priority of a city — of a municipal government — is to keep people safe, and secondarily, to keep things clean. So I think that the public shouldn't expect any changes at any point ever to public safety … My goal is to do everything I can to prevent that from happening.
I've been using the word delicate, because this is a really unique period, but what differs from the 1970s when the steel industry contracted overnight is that every city is dealing with this. We just need to do everything we can to see what will work for Pittsburgh.
What can we do about it?
We're still in flux, right? The world is different. We just have to adapt. But I do think we owe it to city residents to figure out a way to grow and increase revenue, and we also need to figure out a way to cut costs. Both of those things are necessary for the direction that we're headed in. And I think that that is a conversation that the public should participate in.
As a bright spot, our parking taxes have totally rebounded and so have our amusement taxes. So what that tells me is that life Downtown — an economic hub of Allegheny County and Western Pennsylvania — is back. People are coming for shows, they're coming for concerts, they're coming for games. They're coming at night to go out to dinner, but they aren't coming down Monday through Friday at 9 a.m. and leaving at 5 p.m. So I think a big priority for the next four or five years is to figure out really what Downtown Pittsburgh is going to look like in the decade ahead.
We need to be a “yes” city. If you wanna come here and put a rooftop garden on the top of one of these half-filled skyscrapers, how do we say yes? What can we do to allow someone the opportunity to create a funky kind of business? Maybe you're like, “Well, I don't know. That's weird.” But how do you say yes? Because if you wanna come here, you can buy a house much more affordably than you can in a lot of peer-sized cities. Life here is wonderful for a lot of people, but how do we make sure that this next stage of growth is equitable? I think that that's really important, but I also think it's important that we're creative in how we're thinking about this. We need to do everything we can to grow.
What do you wish more people understood about the Controller’s office?
I wish people understood that we are trying. On Twitter and Facebook and the neighborhood groups, you see like, “The city's wasting money here. The city's wasting money there.” We are trying to address those problems. So there is an office they can call: 412-255-2055. We have a controller's office [helper] and her job is — she's awesome — to help people navigate city government and get answers. I think one thing that I have reiterated in our office is if you call the controller's office, you are at your wit's end. We need to get you to an answer. And our office exists to do that. I wanna help people and fix the problem that they're dealing with.
Listen to the full conversation here.
