Pittsburgh school board member Kevin Carter hopes to graduate to a seat in city government, by running for city controller.
“I can take the experience I’ve gained on the school board to city government and serve as a bridge between what is often seen as too divided branches of government,” Carter said. “The complexities surrounding education would definitely prepare me for the challenges that come along with being the controller of not only the city, but the school district as well.”
Carter, of the Manchester neighborhood on the North Side, works as a nonprofit executive with a focus on empowering young people of color. At age 26 he was elected as the youngest school board member in district history, and is serving the second of his four-year terms representing District 8. He announced in mid-November that he would not run for re-election next year, without disclosing other plans. But he cites his district experience — which includes five years chairing the board’s budget committee — as a key qualification for serving as the city’s financial watchdog.
“I wasn’t necessarily a school board member who was ‘go along to get along,’” he said, saying he had opposed budgets that were out of balance. He also voted against tax-hike requests by district administrators, before joining a majority to raise them last year. And he said he worked to direct federal coronavirus funds to where the district needed them most.
Such experiences, he said, taught him how “to navigate professional and personal relationships [and] deliver a number of solutions.” And Carter believes that he could help transcend one of the biggest divides of all: the gulf separating the city from the school district.
Although officials in each entity acknowledge they can’t succeed if the other fails, there has long been tension between them. In part, that stems from the fact that during a period in which the city was under state financial oversight, it was allowed to hold onto a portion of wage tax revenue it collects on the district’s behalf. The city has since emerged from oversight, but has not relinquished those revenues.
“The city is fresh out of financial oversight [and] the school district has complex financial issues,” said Carter. Whether that gap could be resolved or not, he said, “I think there is great opportunity for the controller to work between both parties” by finding ways to help them share services. He noted that the city already covers the cost of school crossing guards, and said that could be a model for other collaborations.
Carter also said he thought the controller’s office could apply more scrutiny to district operations. “I’d like to see the school district being more transparent in their spending,” he said. “There's still a lot of ambiguity around our finances, around our budgeting process, around our contracting processes.”
Carter himself has been directly caught up in such ambiguity. In 2019, he publicly disputed the appearance of his signature on a proposal that would have offered generous tax incentives for a second headquarters for e-retailer Amazon. Carter said his signature was forged, a claim that investigators didn’t definitively resolve but determined was most likely true.
But while the current controller, Michael Lamb, has often expressed concern about the district’s operations, he says state law limits his office’s ability to audit the district. (He has previously undertaken a review of city-provided crossing guards and, at the request of the board, of a laptop-purchasing program.) But Carter says other interpretations of the school code offer a more expansive reading of the controller’s authority.
“I think the controller could be the independent voice taking that objective view of what’s going on inside the district,” he said.
Carter is part of a growing field of candidates to replace Lamb, who announced this summer that he would not run for re-election and later launched his bid for county executive. Former acting county controller Tracy Royston announced her candidacy shortly after Lamb said he would relinquish his job next year, while Lamb’s top aide, Rachel Heisler, announced her own bid last week. Royston has also expressed interest in carrying out school oversight, though she’s said doing so thoroughly may require changing the state’s school code. Heisler has pointed to the earlier audits of some district operations, but echoes her boss in warning that the office’s oversight is limited.
With respect to the city’s operations, Carter said he thought a review of overtime costs in the Bureau of Police and the Department of Public Works — “really looking at that and saying, ‘Are these overtime hours justifiable?’” — might find ways to rein in costs.
Carter hailed Lamb for putting city financial and contract information online, and said it was work he would continue. And he said that, like Lamb, he would maintain scrutiny on large institutional nonprofits, like universities and hospitals, that are tax exempt – at a cost to the school district and the city alike. But he added that solutions “should mainly be facilitated through the legislative aspects of government,” rather than something he would try to broker.
