Pittsburgh Mayor Corey O’Connor has put his stamp on the leadership of the city’s Planning Commission, after a City Council majority approved all seven of his picks to the body Tuesday.
And while some “no” votes were cast against his nominees, Councilors who dissented had little to say afterward.
Four of O’Connor’s picks were confirmed without opposition. Among the others, only one had been particularly contentious prior to the vote: Pro-Housing Pittsburgh founder David Vatz had attracted some attention from public commenters and some council members, in part due to online clashes on his own account, and that of his organization.
The group has long argued the city should focus on expanding the overall supply of housing. It mounted a spirited effort to oppose former Mayor Ed Gainey’s proposal for citywide inclusionary zoning, which would have required new apartment buildings to include a portion of more affordable units. The group argued the requirement could inhibit overall housing construction. Vatz has also questioned some of the Planning Commission’s past decisions, as well as the city’s public-input processes, including the role played by neighborhood groups.
Councilors Barb Warwick and Deb Gross voted against Vatz’s nomination Tuesday. Warwick also voted against confirming the appointment of Gerardo Interiano, a government affairs official at the self-driving vehicle company Aurora.
Warwick declined to comment on either of those votes. Gross said she opposed Vatz’s nomination because of objections raised to his appointment by neighbors and community groups.
She declined to expand on her objections Tuesday. But during a council interview of the appointees last week, Warwick asked Vatz to elaborate on his prior criticisms of the public comment process. He said that while public input can be a “data point” in the Planning Commission’s decision-making, the feedback they hear may not be representative of the community.
“People who can’t afford to leave their child care duties in the evening can’t attend a community meeting,” Vatz said. Commissioners, he said, “need to try to remove bias from the equation and look at every case as it comes to us, and try to make decisions about the trade-offs that occur with any sort of development.”
Beyond Vatz and Interiano, the list of new appointees includes: Darrin Kelly, former president of the Allegheny/Fayette Central Labor Council; Elmhurst Corporation developer Justin Hunt; Diamonte Walker, a former top official in the city’s Urban Redevelopment Authority; and Bob Reppe, who was once a planning official for Mayor Tom Murphy and more recently served as master planner for Carnegie Mellon University.
O’Connor only renominated one of the planning commissioners he inherited from Gainey: LaShawn Burton-Faulk.
Councilor Bob Charland voted against giving her another term on the commission. Afterwards he declined to say why he had done so, although he had often been critical of Gainey’s development agenda, which Burton-Faulk had supported on the commission.
Pittsburgh Mayor Corey O’Connor has laid out a roadmap for the permitting, licensing and zoning reforms he hopes to implement in his administration.
Council’s confirmations come in a week where O’Connor is moving quickly to change the way city government approaches development. On Monday, he announced plans to undertake a large-scale zoning refresh in the coming months — decisions on which would eventually come before the planning commission. The new commissioners are also likely to take up a revamped approach to inclusionary zoning, a Gainey-backed program that requires new developments to set aside a percentage of housing units at costs that would be affordable to people of modest incomes.
Last week’s interview with council gave a preview of how the new commission might approach such issues.
Hunt, for one, told council he’d been against Gainey’s approach to inclusionary zoning as “a member of the industry.”
“ While some projects may work with the previous mayor’s policy, as a city and as a region, it will result in [both less] market-based and mixed-income and affordable housing as well,” he said.
Reppe noted that there is “not one magic bullet” that will solve all of Pittsburgh’s problems, and said part of the Planning Commission’s role is to identify what tools can be used to help bring growth.
“ What might work in one neighborhood is not necessarily the same good for the next neighborhood,” Reppe said.
For her part, Walker said that if the free market were left to operate “unbridled and untempered,” it could create “a level of disparity that policy alone will not fix.”
But she added that Pittsburghers often “pride ourselves on quirk, and I think we need to begin to pride ourselves on being quick. We have a strain of protectionism. And so we are so worried about doing the wrong thing and upsetting the wrong group or the wrong entity that we lend that complexity to those who are actually trying to help us solve these protracted problems.”
Inclusionary zoning, she said, was “one of many tools” — and the real question is, “How do we deploy them in a way that we’re using a scalpel and not a hacksaw?”