Pittsburgh City Council on Sunday approved a budget proposal that raises the city’s property tax rate by 20 percent, from 8.06 mills to 9.67 mills.
During the rare weekend session, Council took a final vote in favor of the tax hike by a vote of 6-2. That would raise the city’s property tax burden by $161 a year for a $100,000 property, would go into effect next year. It’s expected to raise roughly $28.3 million next year.
In all, council passed a $693.2 million spending plan Sunday, up from the $678 million budget originally proposed by Mayor Ed Gainey this fall.
“This budget was very trying for members,” council President Daniel Lavelle said shortly after the vote. “Members had to take very hard votes, no matter which way those votes landed.”
During a public hearing Saturday, a number of residents expressed opposition to a large hike. And the measure was smaller than a 30 percent increase originally proposed by Councilor Barb Warwick. Along with Lavelle, councilors Bob Charland, Deb Gross, Khari Mosley, Erika Strassburger and Barbara Warwick voted in favor.
Council members Theresa Kail-Smith, and Bobby Wilson voted no. Anthony Coghill did not appear to be in chambers when the final vote was taken, but has opposed the tax and opposed it in a preliminary vote earlier in the afternoon.
Shortly afterward, council voted 8-0 in favor of their amended version of the city budget as a whole.
Mayor Ed Gainey’s office was lukewarm about council’s votes Sunday. Jake Pawlak, Gainey’s top budget official, said the administration was “deeply concerned” by other changes to its original budget proposal. He called the 20% hike “significant” but declined to say whether Gainey planned a veto: A fuller response, he said, would be coming early this week.
Under the home rule charter Gainey has 10 days to decide whether to veto the measure: Council would need to maintain the six-vote majority to override his rejection, in what could be a New Year’s Eve showdown. (If he neither signs nor vetoes the measure, it becomes law automatically.)
Warwick, who has long feared the impact of cuts on city services, said Sunday that the smaller increase would help incoming Mayor Corey O’Connor, by giving the city some fiscal breathing room.
“We are equipping the administration to make the change that residents voted to see,” she said as council deliberated the tax hike. “As council we are doing what we can right here to make sure that they can hit the ground running.”
While the budget was proposed by Gainey, council undertook a number of personnel shifts requested by the O’Connor team. And Kail-Smith indicated that the budget hike itself had been a topic of discussion with O’Connor’s administration-in-waiting.
“I would suggest we would hold off until next year until we actually see what the new mayor … can do,” she said. “I know he wants this to pass. I know he wants some tax. … And I’m sure you’ve all gotten some contact information from different people, including unions and others who want to see this happen.”
Other officials have told WESA that while O’Connor’s camp hadn’t pressed for a tax hike, it didn’t try to head one off either — in part because the increase would happen on Gainey’s watch.
O’Connor’s camp did not directly respond to a WESA query about Kail-Smith’s remarks. But in a statement, O’Connor sounded supportive of its budget changes, saying their vote “will improve Pittsburgh’s fiscal position and prioritize the long-term resilience of our city and its operations.
“As mayor, I will ensure that this revenue is used to address Pittsburgh’s pressing needs,” the statement continued.
Supporters of the increase said that was the idea.
“Since I’ve been here, the work that I’ve done has been primarily to expand my constituency to live with dignity stability and opportunity,” said Lavelle. “I believe this vote allows that to take place. I will have absolutely no problem explaining it to all of them how that is and why that is.”
Other council members who supported the measure did so less enthusiastically. Some said they had little choice, given their belief that the 2026 budget submitted by Gainey didn’t include sufficient funding to cover overtime and utility costs.
“I don’t believe we were handed an honest budget,” said Councilor Bob Charland, one of the cosponsors of the 20 percent increase.
Still, Charland said, the increase “really sucks.” But he said, “Without doing this, we’re cratering towards” going into Act 47, a state-run financial-oversight program that sharply constrains a city’s ability to set its own budgets.
“This is not comfortable for any of us, and the gravity of this situation is huge,” he said. “I wish that we had found compromises earlier … so we didn’t have to squeeze our residents.”
“ I do feel like this is the best path forward to address our aging fleet,” said Khari Mosley, citing long-standing concerns about a lack of investment in the city’s trucks and public-safety vehicles. “I do feel like it is our best path forward to address what I do see as core services” like community-based efforts to curtail violence.
Not everyone was so receptive to the approach. Outgoing council member Theresa Kail-Smith, who will step down at the end of the year, said the southwestern Pittsburgh neighborhoods of her District 2 “will not see the benefit of this. And yet it will be our people that are struggling to pay these costs.“
While Kail-Smith said some sort of tax increase was probably necessary, “I think this is not the amount.”
Coghill, who represents the districts next door to Kail-Smith’s, sounded a similar note. Long a staunch foe of any proposed increase, Coghill said that the pending arrival of Mayor-elect Corey O’Connor meant city officials look for additional cuts and efficiencies before having to raise taxes.
Coghill did say he could imagine supporting a tax increase of some size next year: “I’ll make harder decisions next year,” he said.
For now, he said, “I think it’s a harder decision not to raise taxes.”
Bobby Wilson, who also voted no, agreed. He compared council’s action on this budget to its previous willingness to take on more staff at Gainey’s request. “We don’t have a clear plan for how this tax increase will improve the lives of Pittsburghers,” he said. “I do feel like we are taking the easiest path. … This is why people don’t trust government.”
“I recognize the pressures in this budget. I don’t take a no vote … lightly, but i just do not believe that going straight to a tax increase is the right answer,” he said.
Councilors have been wavering on a solution to their budget woes for the past month, debating to little conclusive agreement about what changes they want to make to the $678 million budget proposed last month by Mayor Ed Gainey.
A line-item vote on Thursday saw councilors express a willingness to cut $6.8 million overall from Gainey’s budget — a $5 million chunk of which came from halving the money set aside next year for the city’s antiviolence trust fund. But councilors also wanted to fill a $14.5 million shortfall in potential overtime and utility costs, and put $11.3 million towards other areas like the fleet — an increase in spending that would require a tax increase to accomplish.
On Sunday, Pawlak said the administration was reviewing council’s moves, but said there was special concern about the cuts to violence-prevention programs. Council voted to reduce funding for that program, in part because it planned to draw on existing funds that hadn’t been spent.
Pawlak also noted that council had walked back some of the cuts they had proposed just days before. On Sunday it reversed a plan to cut the police bureau’s horse-mounted unit, and also held off on cuts to a “clean-and-lien” program to rehabilitate vacant lots.
Pawlak said the administration appreciated the change on the vacant-lot program. But he maintained that the willingness to restore such funding with a tax hike in place “validates” the argument that the budget Gainey’s office originally submitted was responsible.
City Controller Rachael Heisler, who has been sharply critical of the budget process, issued a statement decrying the 11th-hour scramble to complete the budget by a Dec. 31 deadline. She said officials “could have, and should have, spent much more time communicating honestly with the public about the cost of essential city services” and presented “a clear, consistent plan for cost containment — not a hodgepodge of one-year haircuts to get us through this single moment.”
Still, while she said the budget was “not perfect and the last-minute amendment process is not ideal… it is a more honest document than what we started with.”
