1 week Ago By Julia Maruca
Dueling press conferences on Tuesday morning sparked a conversation among Pittsburgh officials about how best to deal with discarded trash and illegal dumping. Standing in front of a garbage-strewn vacant lot in Knoxville before Council’s Tuesday-morning meeting, City Councilor Bob Charland told reporters he was “fed up” with the trash. “If you go to another city and you look around, you don't see the trash like you do here in Pittsburgh, and that's a choice that we made,” he said.
“I'm tired of making that choice.” Charland argued that trash in the city has gotten bad enough that state help is needed, and submitted a will of council Tuesday morning to ask Gov. Josh Shapiro for help removing garbage from public and private land.
“We are drowning in trash in Pittsburgh. We've reached a disaster state, and must acknowledge that the city simply does not have the resources to clean up our neighborhoods,” he said. “We know that our public works employees are working as hard as they can to get this city cleaned up.
We also know that that's just not enough.” A will of council is a non-binding statement of council’s position on an issue: Charland’s initial version of the statement asked Shapiro to declare a state of emergency to deal with the trash. But several councilors — Deb Gross, Barb Warwick, Khari Mosley — expressed concern at Tuesday’s meeting that litter disposal did not warrant such a declaration, and removed their names from the bill.
“I feel that we’re somewhat abusing the ask of our governor to declare a state of emergency, which has been reserved for incidents like ...
the collapse of the Fern Hollow Bridge in 2022,” said Warwick, who noted she was not against the idea of cleaning up trash in general. Council President Dan Lavelle convinced Charland to amend the bill, removing the part calling for a state of emergency. “If we're going to ask for a state of emergency, if we were asking one for our hillsides that are falling down, that would be understandable, because we're talking about saving lives at that point,” Lavelle said.
By comparison, he said, “I do have a concern about asking for a state of emergency for litter.” Warwick and the other councilors who removed their names also pointed to ongoing requests for state funding from Pittsburgh Regional Transit. The agency faces a budget squeeze that officials have said may result in slashing the region’s transit service by nearly 40% if the state does not help out.
“I do feel as if we make an ask of this magnitude to the governor, I would prioritize public transportation,” Mosley said. “I don't know how many opportunities we're going to have to go back to the well.” Only minutes before council discussed the bill, Mayor Ed Gainey and Public Works Director Chris Hornstein called a press conference of their own outside council chambers to oppose asking the state to help pick up the trash.
“I can guarantee you that the governor’s got more important issues,” Gainey said, arguing that city workers and community groups are already addressing the problem. “We can handle this right here.” Hornstein said that if there is anything the state can do to help with trash, it would be to push for stronger laws to go after negligent property owners who contribute to the problem.
“The current system allows negligent property owners to ignore citations, leading to no court dates or fines. And in the end, the burden falls on residents who are ending up having illegal dumping in their neighborhoods,” he said. “We are using taxpayer dollar resources to clean up somebody else's mess.
” Gainey and Warwick both pointed to an existing initiative approved by Council, the Community Neighborhood Stewardship program , as one way that Pittsburgh is addressing litter issues in underserved neighborhoods. The $456,000 program is partnering with the Center for Employment Opportunities, a nonprofit that offers employment and reentry services to people returning from incarceration. The program is set to start cleanups in Homewood this weekend, and Gainey invited Charland to ask for Knoxville to be added to its list.
When asked at the press conference, Charland said he was not familiar with Community Neighborhood Stewardship. He said that state assistance could take the form of paying private contractors to help with the trash, but admitted that he wasn’t sure how much it would cost to address the issue. “We have been pushing city resources probably as much as we can here,” Charland said.
“We don't have the trucks to get out into the neighborhoods in the way that we wish we did. We don't have the resources. So we really do need help here from the state.
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