Pittsburgh City Council approves appointments in Mayor Peduto's waning days in office

Pittsburgh City Council on Tuesday approved more than a dozen appointments and reappointments to city boards and commissions, despite concern from at least one council member that Mayor Bill Peduto has only a few months left in office.

Council approved four new appointments and 14 reappointments to several boards, including the Housing Opportunity Fund Advisory Board, ALCOSAN, the Historic Review Commission, the Housing Authority Board of Directors, the Pittsburgh Shade Tree Commission and the Commission on Human Relations.

Councilwoman Deborah Gross abstained from voting on the measure, noting that Peduto was in the lame duck period of his administration. She said she knew and respected several people being appointed or reappointed, but could not vote in favor of approving so many appointments with so little time left before a new mayor takes office.

“There’s less than three months left in this current administration,” she said.

Democratic nominee Ed Gainey, a five-term state representative from Lincoln-Lemington, faces GOP nominee Tony Moreno, a retired city police officer from Brighton Heights, in the November election.

While Gross said some new appointments were made during the last mayoral transition, she said there weren’t as many.

All other council members present — the Rev. Ricky Burgess, Bruce Kraus, R. Daniel Lavelle, Erika Strassburger and Bobby Wilson, along with Council President Theresa Kail-Smith — voted in favor of the appointments.

Burgess and Kail-Smith defended the decision to make the appointments. Both said Peduto had asked them to resign from their posts on different boards when he took office, but they said they refused. Burgess noted that he will have held a position on the Housing Authority Board of Directors under three different administrations when the new mayor takes office.

“We would be willing to work with whomever the mayor is” with regard to appointing people to various boards or removing them, Kail-Smith said.