The company that conducted a controversial police staffing study for the city of Pittsburgh failed to file required paperwork disclosing campaign contributions.
Pennsylvania law requires any company that is awarded a no-bid contract by a state, city, or municipal government to file a report disclosing political contributions by the company, its employees, or their direct family members — even if that report merely states no contributions were made. But as of earlier this month, the Pennsylvania Department of State had not received a filing from Matrix Consulting Group Inc., the San-Francisco based company behind the Pittsburgh police staffing study.
Richard Brady, the president of Matrix Consulting Group, said he wasn’t aware of the requirement to file such paperwork and that it wasn’t mentioned by city officials in their conversations.
After this story was originally published, Mr. Brady told the Post-Gazette on Thursday that Matrix had filed the required paperwork, which indicated that the neither the company nor any of its affiliated employees had donated to any elected official in Pennsylvania.
Mayor Ed Gainey’s office refused to comment.
None of Matrix’s top executives appeared to contribute to Mr. Gainey’s 2021 mayoral campaign, according to a review of financial filings.
All reports must be filed by Feb. 15, with information from the previous calendar year. The contract with Matrix was approved by Pittsburgh City Council in June 2022, meaning the company’s disclosure was due in February.
No-bid contracts at the state level typically have a clause outlining the company’s filing responsibilities, including the need to disclose campaign contributions. No such clause exists in the city’s contract with Matrix.
It’s up to the Pennsylvania attorney general to pursue any violations of this provision of state law, but a district attorney in the county where an alleged violation has occurred also has concurrent jurisdiction over an investigation, according to the state’s election code.
Matrix has conducted similar studies across the U.S. and Canada. That includes about a dozen in Pennsylvania, with one in Mt. Lebanon.
The company’s analysis of Pittsburgh’s police bureau found that the city budgets for the right number of police — 900 — but that some patrol officers should move to other units. New police Chief Larry Scirotto rejected that conclusion in July when the city released the study to the public. But the findings have prompted skepticism from both City Council and the union that represents local officers.
“That whole staffing analysis is a joke,” police union president Rob Swartzwelder said last week. The department has long been far below the budgeted 900 officers and is currently at about 775 uniformed officers, but that number includes command staff. District Attorney Stephen A. Zappala Jr. is investigating the contract.
For rank-and-file officers, there are “just over 300 spread across six zones,” Mr. Swartzwelder said. Mr. Scirotto has said the study was a “recommendation not a directive,” and that there are some recommendations he may implement and others he won’t.
City Council started a review of the contract’s procurement process and the findings of the study itself in July. Lawmakers also requested a legal opinion and have put forth legislation that would change the process for how such contracts are awarded.
The legislation would remove a section of the law allowing what’s called open-end professional services contracts, in which the city engages consultants “on an as needed basis” — without a contract specifying the scope or frequency of the work. It would also require the city controller to sign a waiver for any contract exempt from the competitive bidding process.
Mr. Zappala filed a Right-to-Know request with the city regarding the contract in August after he said “a number of concerns” were brought to his attention.
Mr. Zappala wants to see all contracts between the city and Matrix dating back to Jan. 1, 2019. Some of the concerns raised about the contract have focused on the timeline of the contract and the waiver of a competitive bidding process that the company was granted, which removes the requirement for the city to open the project up to other companies’ bids.
In its final report, Matrix wrote that work on the study began in March. But City Council did not authorize the contract until mid-June.
Ian Brady, the vice president of Matrix’s public safety consulting services, said that was “simply a typo.”
“We started months after that,” Ian Brady said.
City officials initially reached out to Matrix regarding the analysis on May 14, 2022, according to Richard Brady, the company’s CEO. The company met with Public Safety Director Lee Schmidt in mid-June and then began the “highest-level interviews” with the police chief and assistant chief in early July, he said.
In paperwork waiving the competitive bidding process, city officials wrote that Matrix had a previous relationship with the city as a consultant on “police-related litigation.” After Mr. Zappala began his inquiry, city officials said that they may have needed to use the analysis in contract negotiations with the police union, but the report came out after negotiations had concluded and a new contract was finalized.
The waiver also said Matrix was the “only known company” to provide this type of service. But in 2005, the city commissioned a similar study from the International Association of Chiefs of Police.
At a news conference addressing Mr. Zappala’s inquiry in August, Jake Pawlak, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, said the city didn’t want to use the IACP for this study because the possibility that it could be used in union negotiations necessitated “an independent voice.”
The district attorney’s inquiry into the Matrix contract has also prompted a similar inquiry into all the city’s no-bid contracts, dating back to Jan. 1, 2020.
The mayor’s office has accused Mr. Zappala of “playing politics” with his inquiry, and has defended the contract and the study’s findings.
Hallie Lauer: hlauer@post-gazette.com
First Published: October 24, 2023, 2:35 p.m.
Updated: October 26, 2023, 12:56 p.m.