A number of people attended<\/a> and stressed that funding services at the center would greatly benefit the neighborhood.<\/p>\nLast week, council gave its preliminary approval of the bill, but only after debating and eventually voting down a last-minute amendment put forward by Councilor Bobby Wilson of the city\u2019s North Side. Wilson\u2019s amendment would have expanded the bill to all recreation centers citywide.<\/p>\n
At the meeting Tuesday, Councilor Bob Charland introduced a bill of his own that would allocate an equal amount of Stop the Violence money to McKinley Recreation Center. The bill would set aside $200,000 for that center, located in Beltzhoover and in Charland\u2019s district. Charland said the community groups that run programs out of McKinley have had to cap participation in their programs recently due to funding constraints.<\/p>\n
Charland voted against Warwick\u2019s bill last week, citing concerns that it would be unfair to fund one center over others. On Tuesday, he changed his vote to a yes, while introducing his own bill.<\/p>\n
\u201cUltimately, I’m gonna do the exact same play that Councilwoman Warwick did,\u201d he said. \u201cIf that worked for her to fund her rec centers, then what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, and I’m gonna introduce my own legislation here.\u201d<\/p>\n
Warwick said she was \u201cvery enthusiastic\u201d about Charland\u2019s bill to fund McKinley.<\/p>\n
\u201cI hope that this is a trend that we can start seeing citywide,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Both Warwick and Charland agreed that council should have a larger conversation about how to fund and support rec center programming across the city.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think that we need to really evaluate how we are providing this programming to everybody in the city,\u201d Warwick said. \u201cIf you don’t have one of those rec centers in your neighborhood, you don’t get that service. We can’t fix it citywide overnight, but I am very, very glad that this conversation has started.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The City of Pittsburgh will allocate funding to ensure the recently renovated Burgwin Rec Center in Hazelwood can…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":253962,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[73,75,74],"class_list":["post-253961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pittsburgh","tag-pittsburgh","tag-pittsburgh-headlines","tag-pittsburgh-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253961","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=253961"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253961\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/253962"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=253961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=253961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=253961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}