Lourdes Sanchez Ridge, Pittsburgh's solicitor and chief legal officer, will step down next month and return to private legal practice, the city announced Thursday.
Ms. Sanchez Ridge, who was appointed by Mayor Bill Peduto after his first inauguration in 2014, submitted her resignation letter on Tuesday. Her final day in the city's law department will be April 6.
Reached by phone Thursday, Ms. Sanchez Ridge said there wasn't anything specific that brought her to this decision, but that she had only intended to serve one term.
"I served a little more than the first term, and it was just time to go," she said, "because that’s what I had intended to begin with."
Ms. Sanchez Ridge has accepted a job with the Pittsburgh law firm Pietragallo Gordon Alfano Bosick & Raspanti, LLP.
In her resignation letter, she praised Mr. Peduto for envisioning a city government "free of corruption and committed to ethical conduct," according to a city release.
"You always want to do the 'right thing,'" she wrote. "In short, you set a tone at the top that transformed city government's culture to one that makes city employees proud to be public servants. I would not have continued to be City Solicitor for this long had this not been the case."
Tim McNulty, the mayor's spokesman, said the administration hasn't decided on her replacement yet because she has another month on the job.
Ms. Sanchez Ridge joined the Peduto administration with a broad legal background, serving most notably in the Florida State Attorney's office in Miami and as a federal prosecutor in Washington, D.C. Originally from Cuba, she worked as a white collar criminal defense attorney before taking the Pittsburgh job.
She credits her creation of the city's Ethics Hearing Board as one of her proudest accomplishments. The nine-member board formed officially in 2016 to regulate compliance with the city's code of ethics, including the filing of campaign finance forms and gift disclosures.
First Published: March 8, 2018, 7:50 p.m.
