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The week after Labor Day means a couple things. For starters, it’s the time when things start getting real for candidates in this fall’s off-year elections, starting with Allegheny County executive candidates Republican Joe Rockey and Democrat Sara Innamorato.
And while the odds favor Innamorato in heavily Democratic Allegheny County, the season marks another shift for pundits: It’s time to change from our summer wardrobe — white seersucker hoodies in my case — into something more suitable for rough weather.
Rockey has already assembled an introductory TV ad identifying him as “a North Side kid” (though not as a Republican); Innamorato, meanwhile, begins the season having freshly solidified her union support. There’s plenty more to come, including debates aired by KDKA on Sept. 28 and a follow-up WTAE forum on Oct 3.
And if you can’t stand to wait that long, the folks at Pittsburgh Works have thoughtfully put together a sign of things to come: 20 minutes’ worth of Innamorato and Rockey’s remarks as culled from a debate this past spring.
Pittsburgh Works represents a constellation of business interests and more conservative building trades, so the forum focused heavily on economic concerns. And it’s less sharp-elbowed than future debates may be: With six other Democrats on stage, there was little time to challenge anyone’s vision, and as a lone Republican assured of a win in the May primary, Rockey kept his powder dry. But you can see some of this fall’s dividing lines already.
Throughout the event, Rockey leaned heavily into his resume as a first-time candidate for public office and former executive at PNC Bank. Arguing that economic development is a county executive’s top priority, he asked, “As a former executive in business, who better to sell Allegheny County to other businesses to bring them here than myself?”
He also touted natural gas as the region’s crucial economic advantage — a smart move in a room full of people with an economic stake in the industry. Lots of places have nice-looking cities and quality universities just like we do, he said, but natural gas is the key to reclaiming a history in which “we were the manufacturing headquarters of the country for most of the last century. It is our opportunity to go bring that back.”
Innamorato, meanwhile, offered a wider definition of the county’s economic development agenda. It included a discussion of factors such as access to child care — an especially important factor for women trying to enter the workforce — and cultural amenities. If the region is going to attract younger workers, she said, “A lot of that has to do with placemaking and quality of life. … How do we invest in our arts and culture?”
Innamorato also signaled support for a countywide ban on natural gas drilling. That’s a notable point of contrast, but actual drilling opportunities are limited in densely populated Allegheny County. And Innamorato acknowledged that burning gas would be part of the local energy mix for years to come.
While “decarbonizing our energy grid,” is the ultimate goal, she said, creating sufficient renewable energy sources “is going to take more than 10 years.” In the meantime, “Natural gas and natural gas-powered power plants are going to continue to play a role in securing our ability to access energy,” she said.
We’ll see whether that position hurts her: On paper, at least, it echoes the natural gas industry’s long-professed ambition to be a “bridge fuel” to renewables. But it may play into a dawning panic on behalf of some local thinkers, who look towards this fall and fret that the rise of progressive leadership is the symptom of a “broken politics” in which the people who get elected “aren’t really representative of the electorate.”
A lot of this concern has focused on Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey, and a lot of other reporters spent much of their summer focused on a couple blocks surrounding the Downtown intersection of Smithfield Street and Strawberry Way. That area has seen a spike in crime and become a gathering spot for people who could use some support or attention — among them homeless people, people facing mental health challenges, and KDKA Radio’s Marty Griffin.
And while public safety is a municipal responsibility, expect efforts to make it a county issue as well — and not just for the rematch district attorney’s race between incumbent Steve Zappala and Democratic nominee Matt Dugan. Rockey, for one, spent part of his summer building on safety concerns by touring the South Side and Downtown.
Again, it’s not clear yet how much fear about crime in those areas will grab people politically. A WESA/Campos Pulse survey this summer found that people we asked were about as likely to go Downtown as they were prior to the pandemic — though among those who visited less, crime was a salient concern among Republicans and county residents outside the city. (Concern about South Side polled higher.) But it’s not going to be the only issue in which critics seek to link the city’s headaches to Gainey’s fellow progressives.
For example, this week Griffin made a two-day story — and a broader narrative about a divide within organized labor — out of the fact that a top official in the Laborers union had a spat with Gainey during the Labor Day parade. While the Laborers’ gripes with Gainey included a dispute about holiday pay for some city workers, they’re backing Rockey this fall due to a broader concern about the pace of development.
Some of this pushback is part of the cycle of life, the response of an older generation seeing the baton handed off to someone else. To be fair, you don’t have to be old to worry about, say, a potential loss in experience across local government. But speaking as an oldster myself, we could do a lot worse than these two candidates. And we have, many times before.
