Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen A. Zappala Jr. met Friday with officials in Frazier Township, hailing progress it has made in improving road conditions around the troubled Pittsburgh Mills shopping mall.<\/p>\n
But in a lengthy give-and-take with reporters, Zappala also made clear that officials in the administration of former Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey still face a bumpy road ahead.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have charges, yes,\u201d Zappala said. \u201cPeople will be charged.\u201d<\/p>\n
Zappala\u2019s remarks were his first public statement after the unsealing of a warrant application in a long-running investigation of the city\u2019s financial and grant-making practices<\/a>. The nine-page affidavit, which draws largely on testimony from City Council staff and foes of Gainey on City Council, alleges that under the administration, \u201cprocedures were being exploited\u201d to fund favored groups \u2014 even as the administration sought to conceal mounting deficits.<\/p>\n But on Friday, actual charges still sounded a long way off. Zappala said his office expected two more \u201cdocument dumps\u201d from the city, and \u201c[w]hen we\u2019re done with them, we\u2019ll go to the banks, and then we\u2019ll go the targets.\u201d The District Attorney’s office had not yet sought to speak with Gainey himself, Zappala said.<\/p>\n \u201cWe’re looking forward to that,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n In the meantime, however, the affidavit itself has been a subject of intense debate. Gainey critics have seized on it as proof they were right to doubt him, while supporters have accused it of taking a kitchen-sink approach made up of scattershot allegations and factual errors.<\/p>\n Much of the document, which was used to secure a search warrant for city financial documents, concerned budgetary issues, such as Gainey’s decision to include revenue from a tax on professional athletes in financial projections while appealing court decisions that it was illegal. (The city ultimately lost its argument.) That approach was discussed at length in public at the time<\/a>, and disputes about whether financial projections are too rosy are part of the give-and-take of any budget season.<\/p>\n When asked Friday whether he was at risk of criminalizing the kind of decisions politicians make all of the time, however, Zappala replied: \u201cI think instinctively and given our experiences, we can pretty much eliminate strictly a political situation from something that may have merit criminally.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe city\u2019s in bad shape, fiscally,\u201d he said, referring to a potential $30 million deficit that current Mayor Corey O\u2019Connor will have to reckon with at the end of the month, when he presents a draft spending plan for 2027.<\/p>\n The search warrant application is not a charging document: No one named within it has been indicted, let alone convicted. And the contents of the affidavit continue to be disputed by some of those named within it.<\/p>\n As WESA reported previously, for example, the affidavit names a law firm that it accuses of not compiling a telecommunications asset report for which it was paid \u2014 but WESA could find no record of such a contract, while the firm in question says it was never commissioned to carry out the task.<\/p>\n Other groups have also spoken out. On Friday, the progressive advocacy group Working Families Party rejected claims that it had shared an address with a politically powerful service workers\u2019 union, and that it received donations from groups that had gotten funds from the Gainey administration.<\/p>\n The group said the allegations \u201care fairly obviously, completely false.\u201d The group said it backed Gainey \u201cfor no reason other than that we felt he was the right choice.\u201d<\/p>\n Zappala defended the accuracy of the affidavit Friday, saying any errors were addressed before the warrant application was submitted. Told of specific factual concerns, he said, \u201cIf people want to dispute that, we’ll see at the right time in the right way. We can argue about that.\u201d<\/p>\n The application was sealed for months, due to what investigators called \u201ca fear of retaliation, political or physical.\u201d But the affidavit is largely based on information provided by City Council\u2019s then-attorney, Dan Friedson, and City Councilors Anthony Coghill and Theresa Kail-Smith, who had been very public in their criticism of Gainey \u2014 often on topics identified as concerns in the report.<\/p>\n Asked what form the retaliation was expected to take, Zappala said his interest in sealing the affidavit had more to do with fears that \u201cyou\u2019d tip off the target.\u201d But he added that \u201cwhen Coghill brought the issues that he brought to me to City Council, they stacked the room [with supporters of the grant program in a public meeting] and they called him a racist: \u2018How dare you ask questions about the handling of these particular funds?\u2019 <\/p>\n Kail-Smith, he said, \u201cwas concerned about her safety and the safety of some of the staffers.\u201d<\/p>\n Kail-Smith did not respond to a request for comment Friday; Coghill said he had “never” feared being subject to reprisal. <\/p>\n In any case, Zappala said that the search warrant \u201cwasn\u2019t even necessary\u201d for the city to conduct its investigation. He said the probe began after concerns about the use of \u201cp-cards,\u201d essentially city-issued credit cards meant to be used to make smaller-dollar purchases. Use of the cards, and concerns about the city\u2019s level of oversight on payments made with them, drew attention in 2024<\/a>, when a city contractor later accused of engaging in anti-Israel vandalism, was paid with one.<\/p>\n Zappala said that when staff in his office sought documents related to the controversy, the Gainey administration demanded that they obtain a warrant first<\/a>. That, Zappala said, spawned further scrutiny.<\/p>\n \u201cThe warrant’s not exciting or anything. It’s developed for purposes of … doing an accounting of the different funds that we think are at issue,\u201d Zappala said. But \u201cat some point, there are so many administrative problems and hurdles that the city was putting up, it didn’t make any sense.\u201d<\/p>\n The affidavit released this week makes no mention of the p-cards, but Zappala said their use would resurface in the future \u201cin a different way.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou guys will be fascinated by this, I\u2019m telling you,” he said to reporters. “Stay tuned.\u201d<\/p>\n