Mayor O’Connor says the prior administration has left the city with a $250 million budget shortfall. Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen Zappala recently gave an update on his office’s investigation into the city’s finances under former Mayor Ed Gainey.
When Mayor Corey O’Connor was elected as Pittsburgh’s mayor, he uncovered the city’s dire financial situation that was covered up by former Mayor Ed Gainey.
“Over the five-year projected budget, we are seeing a deficit of about $250 million,” O’Connor said in a recent interview.
The steep deficit is nearly twice the amount that Pittsburgh has in its rainy day fund, creating a more dismal picture than anyone had expected. According to O’Connor, former Mayor Gainey underestimated the city’s expenditures and overestimated its revenues for years.
“It was a lot of false projections, and we’re seeing it in every department,” O’Connor said.
When O’Connor’s administration took over, his team reopened the budget to make adjustments to allocations they had questioned. This led to the discovery that the city’s finances were worse than expected. “We knew from day one, we said it was going to be bad, we didn’t expect it to be to this level,” O’Connor said.
In many cases, the city spent millions of dollars more than it had planned for years in a row.
“It is not one thing that’s going to cost the city $25 million, $50 million. It’s a lot of $300,000 [costs] over and over again,” said Dan Gilman, O’Connor’s chief of staff, in a recent interview.
O’Connor’s administration made the last-minute budget changes to bring the city’s budget closer to its actual financial situation.
Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen Zappala recently provided an update on his office’s investigation into the use of taxpayer dollars under former Mayor Gainey’s administration. He said “millions” of dollars are unaccounted for.
Investigators within Zappala’s office are reviewing thousands of financial documents from Gainey’s administration after obtaining a search warrant in March.
“Just prior to arguing the last extension of the warrant, we received 7,000 documents,” Zappala said.
He said the city’s administration is fully cooperating in the investigation into millions of dollars that are unaccounted for between different accounts, contracts, and schemes.
“These are contracts for really important purposes: helping kids, helping seniors. It targets the minority community substantially, and these services were not being provided,” he said.
He said the documents show that the money was spent, but not for the intended purposes.
As the investigation continues, Zappala said the funds may have been spent on “personal stuff.” This is alarming to taxpayers in Pittsburgh. The investigation is expected to take months, according to Zappala.
