Pittsburgh is on something of a roll right now. It is a “comeback city” that creates buzz and has the cool factor. Its cityscape by night is unrivaled.
But a lot of people have been left behind during the renaissance and many things that have long needed done have been left undone.
Moreover, even Mayor Bill Peduto’s supporters would be hard pressed to credit the mayor for many of the good things that have happened in the city. The city has top notch “eds and meds.” A long time ago, it had mayors like Richard Caliguiri and Tom Murphy, who set the table for eventual reinvention. And it has had some luck.
Mr. Peduto has failed to capitalize on that luck or to make progress on many persistent problems. Indeed, he seems disengaged — removed — from his job and from many of the people of the city. He is a man of the political class, not the folk, and he sides with that class. And though he seems to take little joy from politics, it is hard to imagine him as anything but a political professional.
After eight years, it is time for a change. This mayor has had his chance.
Mr. Peduto is articulate but absent. He is good at formulating public policy, but not implementing it. He makes promises that he and others call “progressive,” but he does not keep them.
Nothing in Mr. Peduto’s record justifies the honor of extending his mayoralty to a third term.
Those are a few of the reasons we favor Ed Gainey for mayor.
But there are better reasons to favor Mr. Gainey: While it is almost impossible that he will be a more indifferent mayor than Mr. Peduto, he might just be a very good mayor. Here is why:
• He has relevant experience. He has not only been a state legislator for eight years, but he worked for two mayors — Mr. Murphy and Luke Ravenstahl — and studied their leadership style, their victories and their defeats.
Mr. Murphy was Mr. Gainey’s mentor and his model. What did he learn from him? First, how to follow through and execute. Second, how to broker deals and build consensus. A big part of being a good mayor is passionate interest in the job. When he worked for these men Mr. Gainey tried, in his words, “to learn everything I could about the office of mayor.”
• His roots are deep in the people of the city, not the bureaucracy of the city. He grew up in public housing in East Liberty and has not forgotten where he came from. He has a built-in bias toward constituents and citizens with problems, not insiders and experts.
• His top issues are the right ones: Police reform; affordable housing; and requiring “non-profits,” which are actually rapacious competitors, to pay their fair share of the city’s operating costs.
It will not be easy to make progress in any of those three areas, but Mr. Gainey’s notion of cops walking the beat again and building public trust in the police, rather than profiling target areas by squad cars, is sound. Somehow we both over- and under-police in Pittsburgh.
We would add four other issues that Mr. Gainey has not targeted: Street repair, blight and litter, for starters. The city does a poor job on all three things and they are simply not cosmic enough issues to engage the current mayor’s interest.
And how about our aged infrastructure? This is the reason Amazon did not come here. No one is talking about that in this campaign.
Mr. Gainey and fellow challenger Tony Moreno, an ex-police officer who has run a good novice campaign, would both pay more attention to the basics of local government, which, after all, is about basics, not global warming, or other national and international topics. Mr. Peduto’s administration cannot even manage to get checks, written by citizens to pay taxes, cashed in a timely fashion. That, like filling potholes, is basic.
• This brings us to perhaps the best thing about Ed Gainey: He will show up. He says the mayor must be a constant presence in all 90 of our neighborhoods. He must be in the coffee shops, stores and markets and at the parades and baptisms and bar mitzvahs. He must be a mayor for all of the people, not just the “enlightened” and PC people.
Moreover, Mr. Gainey’s legislative district, which is sociologically and economically richly diverse, has trained him to do that, just as his experience working for past mayors has.
Temperament matters. Ed Gainey is a people person by temperament and a listener and reconciler. We need that. We need direct engagement by our mayor.
To be sure, Mr. Peduto is a better speech maker and policy wonk. But Mr. Gainey is an empathetic leader who has studied the job itself and seems to have his feet on the ground.
The Post-Gazette recommends Ed Gainey for mayor.
First Published: May 12, 2021, 4:00 a.m.
Updated: May 12, 2021, 9:10 a.m.
