Pittsburgh City Council member pushes back on mayor’s plan to pull money from vehicle funding

PITTSBURGH — A Pittsburgh City Council member is pushing back against the mayor’s plan to pull money from vehicle funding.

Mayor Corey O’Connor got a multi-million dollar donation to buy new ambulances, so he moved money out of the ambulance fund for other uses.

That didn’t go over well with one council member, who says that money should be earmarked to buy new vehicles, especially after a recent issue with broken garbage trucks.

Nearly a third of the city’s garbage trucks were down for repairs just last week, leading to delays in trash pickup in neighborhoods like Woods Run.

“We just had the thing with the snowstorm, now we’ve got garbage trucks down, we’ve got fire trucks, you know, we’ve got stations without engines that are functional, so it’s not good,” Councilmember Barb Warwick said.

At council’s meeting Wednesday afternoon, Warwick criticized the new administration for moving $4 million budgeted for new ambulances during the next two years to other departments and uses.

She also introduced an amendment to reallocate that money to buy new fire trucks and garbage trucks.

“(The) fleet has been deprioritized and is being deprioritized again here, Warwick said during the meeting. ”... The reality is, fleet takes a hit every year."

But the city’s acting budget director, Rea Price, says they only opted to move the money after receiving a $10 million donation from UPMC to buy new ambulances.

“We felt that due to the UPMC’s donation, EMS was going to be fine, and we have such critical needs in so many of our departments, we felt that we felt that we should relocate those funds,” Price said during the meeting.

She said that, beginning in 2028, the money — about $2 million a year — would go back into the vehicle fund.

But Warwick says the city is now spending $400,000 every month just to repair vehicles. And while the recent property tax hike, coupled with donations, will allow the city to spend 20 million on new vehicles this year, she says they should be spending that much every year.

“I firmly believe that what we need to do here in Pittsburgh is have dedicated annual funding for vehicles,” Warwick said. “That is the way that we ensure that this administration, the next administration, and so on and so forth, really has accountability about how much money we’re putting into vehicles.”

While Warwick’s proposal to return the funding to the fleet was preliminarily voted down on Wednesday, it will still be on the table when council takes a final vote next Wednesday. That will come after a public hearing next Tuesday.

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