If the Allegheny County Sanitary Authority wants to build public support for multibillion-dollar infrastructure upgrades, it should start by demonstrating that it spends its money wisely. Tossing $50,000 to an 80-year-old retired judge for half-baked public-relations work sends the opposite message.
As the Post-Gazette’s Rich Lord reported Thursday, Robert C. Gallo, a former Allegheny County Common Pleas judge, has been collecting $2,500 a month from Alcosan since mid-2016. That’s $50,000 to date and climbing.
In return, Mr. Gallo has worked an average of about 17 hours a month as an Alcosan frontman, a role that includes attending municipal meetings to talk up agency initiatives like environmental grants and the costly infrastructure improvements needed to keep sewage from overflowing into the rivers during heavy rains.
Except Mr. Gallo doesn’t do much talking. The bulk of it falls to an Alcosan employee who appears with him. Ben Avon Councilman Earl Bohn, who witnessed one recent presentation, said the employee “seemed perfectly capable of doing what she’s doing without a sidekick.”
In all, between July 2017 and April, Mr. Gallo has attended 40 meetings, 22 of them internal. If Mr. Gallo’s value is the doors he opens as Alcosan’s pitchman — and that’s one reason the authority gave for his hiring — it seems pointless to have him attend so many in-house meetings.
Mr. Gallo also has represented Alcosan at seven dinners or lunches and one golf outing. That’s troubling. An agency that’s hiked rates 128 percent since 2008 — and isn’t done yet — shouldn’t be paying him to eat or survey the links. Golfers don’t want to talk about sewage anyway.
Alcosan’s executive director, Arletta Scott Williams, said Mr. Gallo’s contacts, knowledge and work with the Allegheny League of Municipalities make him an asset. He once worked as Alcosan’s solicitor and more recently moderated league panels on the coming infrastructure upgrades and the federal government’s demand for them.
Yet if this gig sounds like patronage, there’s good reason for that. First, as a judge, he employed a relative of John Weinstein, who is the county treasurer and an Alcosan board member. Second, precious little research seemed to preface a hiring the authority has described as so important — Ms. Williams said the $2,500-a-month stipend was her “best guess” as to an appropriate level of compensation.
Deploying Mr. Gallo as an itinerant messenger is a poor way to build goodwill at a time Alcosan is reaching deeply into ratepayers’ pockets; doubling down on financial management is a much better strategy for winning hearts and minds.
When the Port Authority was having management problems several years ago, county Executive Rich Fitzgerald stepped in to right the ship. Now might be a good time for him to pop in at Alcosan and lay down the law there as well.
First Published: July 6, 2018, 4:00 a.m.
