In the wake of a tight draft budget for 2027 and worrisome fiscal predictions for the city’s future, Pittsburgh City Councilors are introducing reforms aimed at making the city’s budget process more transparent and sustainable.
Councilors unveiled the package at a press conference midday Tuesday. The reforms are a mix of yet-to-be-introduced bills and internal policy changes related to financial practices.
“Fixing our structural budget issues requires a whole-of-government approach, and we expect these measures to tighten fiscal accountability and our spending habits,” City Councilor Erika Strassburger said. “These reforms will not solve all of our problems that we face, but they are important to improve residents’ trust in city government.”
The reforms include an upcoming bill requiring Council to gather quarterly throughout the year for meetings on the city budget. Council has already been doing so for the past year, but a bill mandating the meetings would make the practice official.
“Members can ensure revenue shortfalls or cost overruns come to light ahead of time, so every branch of government can collaboratively and proactively address budgetary concerns,” Strassburger said. “We’ve held these post-agenda hearings over the last year, and they have been incredibly informative in ensuring that every council member is digging into the budget early on in the process.”
Council’s budget office is also working on training for Councilors and their staff to better educate them on budget processes.
Among the proposed internal changes is an agreement between Mayor Corey O’Connor’s office and City Controller Rachael Heisler’s office to share more city budget data with the controller. Heisler’s office would gain access to Questica, the City’s budgeting software, which it has not had access to before.
“Each of the city’s elected officials should be scrutinizing the budget year-round, not just in the fall-time budget season,” Strassburger said.
“The information that this will provide our office will allow us to see problems more quickly,” Heisler said. She praised the reforms as a whole: “At the end of the day, this is a really good thing for city residents, for city taxpayers, and also for vendors who do business with the city, so they can see where things are, money that’s been spent, and it will also improve that process.”
Also forthcoming are internal policy changes to how the city handles p-cards, or city credit cards. The cards have been the subject of scrutiny and debate, but the changes Strassburger forecasted Tuesday focus more on avoiding redundancies and “clarifying what’s appropriate for reimbursement.” They’d also create a public p-card dashboard with data on spending by department, vendor, amount, and date.
Other internal policy changes would encourage departments to spend down their allocations each year before the next budget period starts, in order to free up money.
Council also expects to see legislation introduced soon that will clarify Council’s role in approving certain kinds of contracts. Councilor Barb Warwick said Tuesday that the contracts, called co-op agreements, are sometimes approved by Council and sometimes not. She said her bill would clarify their handling.
“[Co-op agreements] are agreements where another body of government already has a contract for a given good or service and the city “piggybacks” onto that agreement,” she said. “We want to make sure that when the numbers are large for those, or that those agreements are going on for multiple years, that council is seeing that and is voting on that just like we do for all other spending.”
The moves come as city officials reckon with a 2027 draft budget, proposed by Mayor Corey O’Connor, that projects a series of deficits which, unless addressed, will empty out the city’s savings account within the next few years. And to some extent, they reflect concerns with how fiscal matters were handled under former Mayor Ed Gainey, who current elected officials say submitted spending plans that masked the scope of the city’s fiscal problems.
But the proposals appear to have broad support among council members.
Warwick and Councilor Anthony Coghill were listed as co-sponsors of the reforms with Strassburger. On Tuesday, Councilors Khari Mosley, Kim Salinetro and Bob Charland joined them in presenting the reforms.
“I look forward to doing a deeper analysis of the bills when they’re proposed, as well as the non-legislative reforms,” Mosley said. “But I think it’s just important to show that we’re all pushing for accountability, we’re all pushing for transparency, and we’re all pushing for collaboration and communication amongst the various branches of government, because ultimately it’s about the public trust.”
Mayor Corey O’Connor also stood with councilors in support of the changes at the press conference.
“These are great bills. These are great changes that needed to probably happen 20 years ago. Shame on us for not doing it a long time ago,” he said. “In order for us to turn this around, it’s transparency that’s going to help in the long term.”