Gainey, Pittsburgh council debate plan to move cable bureau under mayor's office

Pittsburgh City Council members said they aren’t comfortable with Mayor Ed Gainey’s proposal to move the city’s cable bureau under the control of the Mayor’s Office.

Gainey’s proposed 2023 budget calls for moving the cable bureau, the print shop, the nonemergency 311 line and various communication staff under his office’s purview.

City Council President Theresa Kail-Smith had already said she was not prepared to support the move. Other council members chimed in with similar concerns Tuesday during a budget hearing with the Mayor’s Office.

The Mayor’s Office currently houses a communications office that has only two employees. Gainey suggested a more unified communications team with additional staffing — which would absorb the city’s cable bureau — could bolster the city’s communications efforts in an era of constant news and social media.

“I think that vehicle can help us,” the mayor said. “We got to show the city what’s going on.”

The cable bureau currently is housed within the Department of Innovation & Performance. It serves City Council, as well as the Mayor’s Office and other various city departments.

“Department of I&P — they don’t do communication,” Gainey said. “It’s in the wrong place just because that’s not what they do. It should be in the office of communications, because that’s what they do.”

Council members, however, voiced concerns with the idea of consolidating all communications staff into the Mayor’s Office.

“The idea of communication existing solely in one branch of government is not really in the best interest of the population as a whole,” Councilman Bruce Kraus said, adding that he worries future mayors could strip the cable bureau’s services for City Council or other departments.

“It’s good to modernize, but I don’t know if we have the comfort level of will our needs be met,” Councilwoman Deb Gross said.

Gainey, however, said the goal was not to pull resources away from City Council and other city departments, but rather to perform the same work under a different office’s control.

“I don’t ever want to hold any department, any office back from you,” he told council members. “To me, that would be counterproductive. Anything that we have, we definitely want you to be able to utilize. I believe that would make the city better.”

Jake Pawlak, director of the Office of Management and Budget, said the idea is to create “one cohesive team” of communications and cable bureau staff, but there are no plans to make any changes to what they actually do.

“The code-defined responsibility of the cable bureau to first and foremost serve the function of recording for the public and broadcasting council meetings and other city business would in no way change,” Pawlak said.

Kail-Smith suggested that a potential compromise could be creating a separate department to house the cable bureau, independent of the Mayor’s Office and outside of the Department of Innovation & Performance.

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This comes as Gainey has proposed a reorganization of how several city functions are housed in local government. His proposed agenda would bring 35 new full-time, permanent positions to the Mayor’s Office, which this year had only 11 employees.

Some of those positions already existed elsewhere in city government and would simply move into the Mayor’s Office. Other positions are entirely new, including seven new neighborhood services staff, five new communications employees and two new workforce development workers, City Council Solicitor Peter McDevitt said.

The proposal would require about $2.7 million more than last year in funding for the Mayor’s Office’s staff, he said.

Gainey has proposed moving the Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs and the city’s ADA coordinator into his office.

The Office of Equity would be dissolved, under Gainey’s proposal, and consolidated within the Mayor’s Office. The same functions would be performed, Deputy Chief of Staff Felicity Williams said, but it would not be a separate office.

The nonemergency 311 line would be housed within the neighborhood services team in the Mayor’s Office, according to the proposal. Gainey said that effort aims to improve responses for community concerns.

Gainey’s proposed budget also calls for moving the Office of Community Health and Safety out of the Mayor’s Office and into the Department of Public Safety, where Pawlak said it may eventually become its own independent bureau, like police, EMS and fire.

Pittsburgh City Council currently is hosting budget hearings to discuss the proposed budget. They are expected to vote on the operating and capital budgets Dec. 19.