Pittsburgh City Council President Theresa Kail-Smith has been nominated to serve again on the board for the Allegheny County Sanitary Authority, nine years after she quit the board unexpectedly.
Kail-Smith said she agreed to serve, but reluctantly. Mayor Ed Gainey’s office first tried to convince Councilor Deborah Gross to serve on the board and approached Kail-Smith next.
“I was not interested,” she said. Nevertheless, after some coaxing under the portico at the City-County Building, Kail-Smith said she agreed to serve again.
Kail-Smith quit her post on the board in 2013 because she said she felt “blindsided” by actions taken by the authority that she said she wasn’t informed about until after the fact. At the time Michael Lamb, the former controller for Allegheny County, was following up on a report that the authority had awarded no-bid contracts without documenting the hiring process.
Kail-Smith said she worked with ALCOSAN Executive Director Arletta Williams at the time to post job openings publicly. Kail-Smith said she has heard second-hand that hiring procedures have improved at ALCOSAN since her last stint on the board, but she is waiting to see for herself before commenting publicly.
She said ALCOSAN can expect her to provide the same level of scrutiny to its processes that she applied nine years ago.
“I'm going to consistently look to make sure that we are doing things appropriately and in the best interests of the ratepayers,” she said.
Kail-Smith has been nominated to replace former City Councilor Corey O’Connor, who resigned his position on the board after his appointment as Allegheny County Controller.
Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald also nominated Darrin Kelly, the president of the Allegheny/Fayette Central Labor Council, to serve on the board, according to a news release Friday. Kelly replaces longtime labor leader Jack Shea, who died in August.
The two nominations come as ALCOSAN continues to ramp up construction on its Wet Weather Plan. The $2 billion plan is being implemented over 15 years and will prevent 7 billion gallons of combined sewage and stormwater per year from entering the region’s three major rivers.
ALCOSAN already has begun construction on an expansion to its wastewater treatment plant and is finalizing the design of the first of three underground tunnels that will hold sewage overflows during rains.
A subcontractor for ALCOSAN, Mascaro, is already $14 million over budget on work to expand ALCOSAN’s treatment plant. The cost overruns are related to a dispute about the type of soil being excavated at the construction site.
Kelly said he plans to call every county council member to listen to their concerns and learn about their priorities for ALCOSAN. But he understands that the Wet Weather Plan is the largest going concern, he said.
“The most important thing is just transparency,” he said. “This is almost a $2 billion investment to our infrastructure … And there's going to be a lot of construction, a lot of questions.”
At its September board meeting, ALCOSAN awarded construction management services to the engineering firm Hatch for a nearly 5-mile long tunnel to be built under the Ohio River. Although construction is still several years away, ALCOSAN staff said at the meeting in September that they need the construction management firm in place to help finish the design of the tunnel.
The board authorized Williams, its executive director, to negotiate a fee with Hatch. Williams did not attend the September board meeting because of a health issue, according to an ALCOSAN employee at the meeting. A spokesperson for ALCOSAN did not respond to two emailed requests for comment.
The board has seven members — three nominated by the city of Pittsburgh, three nominated by Allegheny County and one appointed jointly by both government bodies.
Earlier this year, the county council declined to renew the appointment of ALCOSAN board member Sylvia Wilson, who holds the joint appointment shared by the city and the county. Wilson continues to serve on the board until a replacement is nominated and confirmed. A spokesperson for the city didn’t respond to an emailed question about whether the city is looking for a replacement for Wilson.
