On Monday, the Pittsburgh City Council gave preliminary approval to a budget amendment that would pull $285,000 out of the city’s paving fund and spend it on community service efforts.
Pittsburgh’s 2016 budget allocated $75,000 in federal Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) funds to the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank and another $74,000 for the Pittsburgh Community Services hunger program, but those lines were zeroed out in the 2017 budget proposal submitted by the mayor’s office.
Council President Bruce Kraus’s amendment would restore some of that funding, allocating $65,000 to the food bank and $80,000 to Pittsburgh Community Services. Another $5,000 will be divided between the Pittsburgh Meditation Center and Pittsburgh Action Against Rape. The remaining $135,000 will be apportioned for in-council-district project spending.
Kraus said that is not a final solution to what he fears will be falling CDBG allocations from Washington in the future.
“The real challenge is where do we go from here and what happens next year,” Kraus said during Monday’s council meeting. “But this was a safety net to keep from having that rug pulled out in its entirety all in one year.”
Council approved the move, but several members, including Dan Gilman, voiced concern that the paving fund is not the right place to find the money.
“This city needs its paving budget after years of neglect, and so I don’t want to see it tapped into too much," Gilman said. "But at least for today, it’s the right thing to get...into the budget."
Gilman said council should look more closely at the budget in January in an effort to find a way to restore the paving funds.
Council member Theresa Kail-Smith echoed Gilman’s concerns.
“I think there’s millions of dollars sitting in this budget for projects that have not been done for years,” Kail-Smith said. “I think we need to sit down as a council and decide how we can put that money back into the budget.”
Every year, the city budget allocates dollars for capital projects on wish lists. Those projects may not launch due to a variety of reasons, including an inability to get matching dollars, a failure to commit additional allocations in succeeding years, or a decision to move in another direction. Kail-Smith wants to free up those funds for everything from paving to community policing.
With the reductions approved by council, the paving budget for 2017 would be just less than $15 million, which is nearly equal to the 2016 budget. The $285,000 reduction would roughly equal one mile of street resurfacing.
