Mayor Gainey answers questions from the campaign trail | The Homepage

Mayor Gainey addresses some of the volunteers at the April 5 canvassing event in The Run. Photo courtesy of Junction Coalition

By Ziggy Edwards and Ray Gerard for Junction Coalition

Editor’s note: Starting with the Feb. 2 14th Ward Independent Democratic Club mayoral forum, The Homepage and Junction Coalition committed to covering the race from a 15207 perspective. Both Democratic candidates have a track record in our communities. Their past actions can offer insights into how the outcome of this primary will affect Homepage readers. Junction Coalition intended to sit down with Mayor Ed Gainey and County Controller Corey O’Connor for interviews. After agreeing to answer questions, Mr. O’Connor’s campaign did not respond to multiple scheduling attempts. Mr. Gainey’s campaign responded but did not follow through on scheduling a sit-down interview.

We caught up with Mr. Gainey at an April 5 mini-rally in The Run, where he addressed about 40 Greenfield and Hazelwood residents as they geared up for an afternoon of door-knocking.

In his remarks, Mr. Gainey highlighted how his approach to development and affordable housing differs from that of his challenger in the primary, Allegheny County Controller and former District 5 City Councilor Corey O’Connor.

“What I’ve told developers is that...if you give me 10% [affordable units] from inclusionary zoning, I have no problem helping you out with your gap. They don’t want to do it, so they’re saying I’m stopping development because I won’t give them 100% market rate,” he explained. “We have built market rate for the [previous] eight years, and we’ve lost close to 15,000 people ... they can’t afford the rent. More people are being priced out. I don’t want people to be priced out; I want us to be priced in.”

Mr. O’Connor, he said, has so far received $280,000 from the same real-estate executives who stand to profit from development of such market-rate housing.

“If they do that, we will continue to bleed from our population, and we can’t afford that. The money you take is who you owe… He’ll say you should have inclusionary zoning in certain neighborhoods. So, what’s that, only in poor neighborhoods? You see, now we’re talking about housing segregation. We’ve had classism in this city all my life. And for the first time, they’ve seen that we were serious about having a city for all.”

Fundraising and spending by the two campaigns has grown increasingly lopsided throughout the race, with Mr. O’Connor far ahead of Mr. Gainey. Campaign finance reports filed with the city’s Ethics Hearing Board showed Mr. O’Connor raising $257,161.50 in March, compared to $142,870.25 raised by Mr. Gainey in March. And Mr. O’Connor spent about five times as much as Mr. Gainey that month. (See Page 9 for more on fundraising.)

Mr. Gainey added that his opponent also drew $160,000 from “MAGA Republicans” and $25,000 from UPMC board members. “If he gave all that money back, we’d be tied in how much money we’ve both raised,” he said. “When you start to take money that sells out people, when you start to cater to big developers, when you tell UPMC, ‘I will take the [lawsuit] off the table,’ that’s not going to improve us.”

“My power is in you,” he concluded. “His power’s in the money players. Let’s show them what the power of the people can do.”

As the crowd fanned out with their checklists of addresses, Mr. Gainey answered some of our questions while standing in Four Mile Run Field — which had been slated as part of the route for the now-abandoned Mon-Oakland Connector project. In 2023, the former youth baseball field was the site of a mock funeral for the shuttle road after Mr. Gainey canceled the year project the year before.

Mr. Gainey agreed to answer additional questions for this article, and the Q&A below is compiled from brief exchanges at campaign events and by email between April 5 and April 11. His responses have been lightly edited and condensed.

JC: Regarding traffic calming throughout the city, some people are all for it and others are opposed. Since you became mayor, you’ve increased funding for traffic calming across the city. What are your reasons for doing so?

EG: We have had an average of 20 deaths a year on our roadways — one death is too many — and we have to use every tool at our disposal to save lives, which is why I have increased funding for traffic calming. As Mayor, safety will always be my biggest priority when making decisions about our city and any infrastructure or design changes in our neighborhoods.

JC: Given the threat to city- and countywide public transportation and the fact that the majority of riders are city residents, what can the mayor’s office do to help prevent severe service cuts?

EG: As a former state representative, I am the only candidate in this race who can work in tandem with our County Executive and state legislature to deliver the funding PRT requires to be a world-class public transit system. As PRT faces a fiscal cliff, I will use every opportunity to leverage these relationships to secure real long-term investments into public transit so that we can continue to build a city where everyone can move freely whether they have access to a car or not.

JC: At the contentious Feb. 17 community meeting in Greenfield, you started to explain what you inherited from the Peduto administration regarding city services and DPW but were repeatedly interrupted. Can you explain this to our readers now?

EG: Corey O’Connor was on City Council for 10 years. You heard them say our fleets, our trucks, our police cars and fire engines have been underfunded for the last 15 years. So that means every year on council, he didn’t say one word about why we needed to fund our fleet.

My administration put $40 million into it — $20 million from ARPA, $20 million from our general budget. We bought police cars and we bought DPW trucks for snow. We funded what was underfunded for so many years. I’ve only been in office for three years, and the fleet is 12 to 15 years old. Who’s to blame? Mr. O’Connor voted to not increase the police officers. We came in and we put through four to five classes of recruits already. But everything he’s saying is a problem... why didn’t [he] address these issues on council?

JC: How did you come to the decision to cancel the Mon-Oakland Connector?

EG: They were talking about transportation that wasn’t for everybody. It was only for the elites so the elite wouldn’t have to deal with traffic, so the elite wouldn’t have to deal with parking, so the elite wouldn’t have to deal with just catching a regular bus over here...If you’re going to have transportation, make it for everybody, not just a certain population that doesn’t pay taxes anyway.

JC: When you canceled the Mon-Oakland Connector, you said that redeveloping the Bates Street corridor would be a better option. Can you explain why that is a better route to move people between Oakland and Hazelwood? What can you do as mayor to make the Bates Street project happen?

EG: The Mon-Oakland Connector was an attempt to ram a roadway through a park and harm the Four Mile Run community. Instead of damaging the natural beauty of the park and neighborhood, I have followed the community-led alternative plan to fund additional sidewalks on Second, Hazelwood and Greenfield avenues to improve connectivity, add traffic-calming measures to keep our children safe, and create new bike connections between the neighborhoods to promote alternative transportation methods.

Any project of the magnitude of the Bates Street redesign should include conversations with the community around dedicated bus lanes to make transit more attractive for short trips to our high-traffic corridors like Oakland. Ultimately, the Bates Street approach will require partnership with PennDOT. My administration has developed an extremely strong and productive relationship with PennDOT and have been discussing the Bates Street approach with them for several years. Transportation projects can be slow-moving, but we are on the right track.

Election information

Pittsburgh’s primary election is May 20. Polls will be open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. May 5 is the last day to register to vote, and May 13 is the deadline to apply for an absentee or mail-in ballot. Ballots must be received by 8 p.m. on May 20. Check your voter registration status at pavoterservices.pa.gov/pages/voterregistrationstatus.aspx.

Junction Coalition is a grassroots organization comprising residents of Four Mile Run and surrounding communities.