As Pittsburgh’s Democratic rivals for mayor spew facts and figures on the campaign trail, they’re also sprinkling in misinformation.

Whether by accident or design, Mayor Ed Gainey and Allegheny County Controller Corey O’Connor have at times distorted, exaggerated or misrepresented issues during debates, news conferences and other public appearances.

“Misinformation is increasingly common, and it is incredibly problematic,” said Alison Dagnes, a political science professor at Shippensburg University. “Gone are the days when anybody gets a full story. Voters get fragments of information.”

Dagnes said it’s particularly troubling when elected officials and candidates share misinformation, disinformation or information out of context because of “legitimacy bias,” meaning people tend to believe those in positions of power who ought to know what they’re talking about.

“It makes it incredibly hard to combat that,” Dagnes said, adding that voters are also more likely to believe their preferred candidate.

With the primary election on May 20 coming up soon, TribLive looked at some of the candidates’ claims in an effort to separate fact from fiction.

There’s plenty of fodder.

During televised debates and at news conferences, Gainey and O’Connor have bickered over data about public safety, affordable housing and Downtown revitalization.

The campaigns and candidates haven’t been shy about trying to spin talking points to the media. During more than one debate, a member of Gainey’s campaign team sent a TribLive reporter a flurry of texts in real time and followed up by email, purporting to fact-check O’Connor.

O’Connor, meanwhile, has repeatedly questioned figures Gainey often trumpets.

During one debate, O’Connor claimed an ambulance had broken down the week before. While officials have acknowledged problems forcing ambulances to be taken out of service, in that particular incident, the vehicle just needed more coolant.

Gainey often says he’s “delivered” 1,600 units of affordable housing. But only about 500 of those have actually been completed. And not all of them are new; some are simply projects that preserved existing units.

Here’s a look at which campaign claims are true, which are false and which are lacking important context.

O’Connor claimed the city anticipated no earned income tax growth in its five-year projections

The 2025 budget actually shows earned income tax revenue increasing every year through 2029.

Earned income revenue increased by $5.6 million last year, compared to the year before, surpassing projections by about $1.1 million.

O’Connor later clarified to TribLive he meant to refer to the local services tax, a $52 tax everyone who works in the city pays. The city budget anticipates slight drops in that line each year through 2029.

The 2025 budget anticipates that revenues overall will decline this year. Some major revenue streams — including real estate tax — are expected to drop every year over the next five years.

Gainey says city ended 2024 in ‘strong’ financial position with $4 million surplus

Gainey is correct when he says the city ended 2024 with a surplus of about $4 million.

But O’Connor is correct, too, when he points out that’s a much smaller surplus than the city had anticipated.

Officials initially planned for a $28 million surplus last year.

Revenues came in lower than projected and spending in some categories — including public safety overtime — went above budget.

Whether the city is on sound financial footing or on the brink of disaster has been a common subject of debate in City Hall. Everyone agrees the city is going to see some lean years ahead as revenues decline, covid-19 money dries up and the rainy day fund shrinks to within 1% of the legal minimum.

Gainey and his top budget officials have repeatedly sought to assure residents these financial challenges won’t translate to tax hikes or drastic service cuts. But Controller Rachael Heisler and several council members have questioned whether the city’s 2025 budget is realistic, with overtime spending in the departments of public safety and public works already outpacing expectations.

Pro-O’Connor mailer blames Gainey for blight

A controversial mailer distributed by an independent expenditure group that endorsed O’Connor spurred controversy last month.

It included a photo of a blighted building with graffiti scrawled on the bricks and vines creeping into broken windows. The image was captioned: “The Ed Gainey Legacy.”

But that Uptown building is no longer in disrepair.

Helen Perilloux, the Realtor whose name can be spotted on a sign in the image, said the property had at one time fallen into “serious decay,” with a leaking roof, broken plaster and peeling paint. But that was years before Gainey took office.

She eventually connected with someone who was willing to rehabilitate the dilapidated building, Perilloux said in a social media post. The building now has two housing units, no graffiti and no smashed windows.

“So to reiterate, neither the building’s blight nor its salvation had anything to do with Mayor Gainey,” she wrote.

O’Connor was not directly involved in crafting or distributing the controversial flyer. He has distanced himself from it and condemned “hateful rhetoric in any form” after some argued linking the city’s first Black mayor to blight was racist.

Mike Mikus, who heads the independent expenditure group that sent out the mailer, declined comment.

Gainey says the city’s vehicle fleet had seen no investment in ‘10, 15 years’ before his administration

Gainey in a recent mayoral forum claimed the city’s fleet — its more than 1,300 ambulances, police cars, snowplows, public works trucks and other vehicles — had not seen investment in 10 or 15 years.

While officials largely agree the fleet has been underfunded for decades, Gainey’s claim that no one had poured any money into it for years before he took office is untrue.

In 2021 — the year before Gainey was sworn in as mayor — the capital budget included nearly $11 million for the fleet. That’s more than the $6 million the Gainey administration budgeted for the fleet this year.

The four years leading up to the Gainey administration saw annual fleet investments of between $5 million and nearly $9 million.

The mayor’s capital spending plan — which could change — anticipates allocating about $3 million to the fleet in 2026 and even less in the following four years.

When Gainey took office, the fleet already was older than what officials would consider to be optimal. City Council Budget Director Peter McDevitt has said the city would need to invest about $20 million per year to properly maintain the fleet.

Pro-O’Connor mailer claims Gainey gave sweetheart deal to wife’s friend

The same mailer that depicted the formerly blighted house also made this claim: “Gainey even awarded a sweetheart contract to his wife’s business partner.”

It’s referring to a controversial contract the city awarded to Bounce Marketing & Events, whose president, Fantasy Zellars, has worked with the mayor’s wife. The deal made Bounce Marketing & Events the official promoter of a city-sponsored Juneteenth celebration.

Another event organizer who had long promoted a different Juneteenth event cried foul when Gainey opted to contract with someone else for a city-sponsored celebration.

It sparked division among council members and the public.

But the contract was approved through the proper channels.

The city opened a competitive bid process, the same standardized procedure it uses to select vendors for an array of contracts. Bounce Marketing & Events won.

Officials said the company’s focus on local artists best met the city’s requirements. The legacy Juneteenth event that was initially passed up received city funding, too.

Gainey says his administration gave police their first pay raise in over 20 years

The mayor during a recent forum said his administration gave the city’s police bureau its first pay raise in more than two decades.

His administration struck a deal with the union representing police in 2023. The new contract gave officers a pay bump and standardized discipline.

But it wasn’t the first pay raise the city’s officers had seen in 20 years.

Emilia Rowland, a spokesperson for Gainey’s campaign, said the mayor’s statement was a “slight miswording” referring to the fact that his administration gave the police their first pay raise in two decades that was achieved through a contract negotiation that avoided arbitration.

Arbitrations did give the city’s police modest pay increases in the years before Gainey took office. Union President Robert Swartzwelder told TribLive after the 2023 contract was finalized that officers had seen, on average, pay raises of about $11 an hour between 2002 and 2023.

O’Connor claims Gainey shut down 2 of 3 ROOTS sites

The city at one point had three offices for its Reaching Out on the Streets — or ROOTS — initiative, which aims to help vulnerable residents, especially those experiencing homelessness, connect with various resources. Sites were staffed by social workers who could help people find shelter or get support for addiction or mental health issues.

O’Connor criticized Gainey for not opening a ROOTS facility in each of the city’s six police zones, something O’Connor has said he would do if elected.

“This administration has failed to deliver on its promises to embrace our most vulnerable residents,” O’Connor said, standing before a shuttered ROOTS location on Broad Street in East Liberty.

He claimed that under Gainey’s leadership, two of the three ROOTS facilities were shut down.

The Broad Street location has closed.

But the Downtown site on Smithfield Street didn’t actually close — it just relocated, said Cara Cruz, a public safety spokeswoman.

Those same services are now available at the nearby Second Avenue Commons homeless shelter, which is also Downtown in the same police zone.

The third ROOTS facility is still operating — with limited hours — on East Ohio Street on the North Side.

Gainey says the city doesn’t ‘have one bridge that’s in failing condition’

Gainey has often trumpeted as a success the fact the city does not have any open bridges in failing condition.

But the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation wouldn’t allow a failing bridge to remain open anyway. Bridges rated “failed” or “imminent failure” must be closed to traffic, according to PennDOT’s rating guidelines.

While the city does not have any open bridges with failing grades, it has closed two spans because of safety issues since Gainey took office.

The Charles Anderson and Panther Hollow bridges remain closed for repairs.

The mayor has made strides in improving bridge upkeep. The city is now conducting the type of maintenance that federal investigators said led to the Fern Hollow Bridge collapsing into a ravine in the city’s Frick Park in January 2022. Such basic work had long been ignored on spans throughout the city, officials have acknowledged.

The mayor also often touts a commission that is dedicated to managing the city’s infrastructure. But O’Connor, when he was a council member, authored the legislation to create it. It took Gainey over a year to fill enough seats for the commission to begin its work.

O’Connor criticizes Gainey for failing to update climate action plans

O’Connor has criticized Gainey for not updating the city’s Climate Action Plan, which was last renewed in 2018.

O’Connor has said the city code requires the plan be updated every five years. The last version was formally adopted in 2018.

Technically, the city code only says the Climate Action Plan should be updated as needed. It doesn’t set a specific timeline.

But the most recent iteration of the Climate Action Plan, adopted in 2018, says it’s a five-year plan, meaning it’s now beyond its intended lifespan.

While it’s true that the city hasn’t updated its Climate Action Plan since Gainey took office, the mayor recently said he’ll incorporate that document into a broader comprehensive plan that’s already underway.

The mayor has spent over $6 million on a controversial citywide master plan, which officials expect will encompass various neighborhood plans, propose new zoning reforms and provide a roadmap for future development.

“What we’re going to do is we’re going to incorporate the climate change report, the plan, into our comprehensive plan because climate change should be involved in everything,” Gainey said.

That larger plan is expected to be completed in two or three years.

Homicide data

One of Gainey’s mantras on the campaign trail is his success in lowering the number of homicides in the city under his leadership.

Homicides have dropped in recent years, following a national trend of fewer killings since a spike around the pandemic.

While Gainey is correct in stating there were no homicides last year involving victims between 13 and 17 years old, he has sometimes said there were no homicide victims at all under 17 — and that’s not true.

In fact, authorities identified a 6-week-old, a 4-month-old, and a 3-year-old as homicide victims last year.

Rowland, the Gainey campaign spokeswoman, said Gainey’s claim that there had been no homicide victims under 17 was a “slight miswording.”

So far this year, there have been two gun-related homicides in the 17-and-under age group, Cara Cruz, a police spokesperson, said. One was 14 and the other 17.

O’Connor mailer says Gainey tripled size of mayor’s office while cutting funding for 50 first responders

The controversial mailer sent by the independent expenditure group backing O’Connor claimed Gainey tripled the staff of the mayor’s office and slashed funding for 50 first responders in 2024.

Technically, those claims are true — but they could be considered misleading.

The mayor’s office budget has grown to nearly five times what it was when Gainey began his term. Some of that reflects new jobs, like a much-expanded communications team. But some of the expansion also reflects a reorganization of Pittsburgh government that moved some city employees under the mayor’s office budget.

Gainey’s 2024 budget capped the maximum size of the police force and slashed funding for 50 unfilled police officer positions.

The change was only on paper and reflected the reality that the city was unable to recruit and retain enough officers to reach the 900 threshold it had in previous budgets.

The 2025 budget cut an additional 50 police officers from the budget, though the number of officers remains below the budgeted figures.

Gainey denies secret deal with former police chief

Gainey has recently denied striking a backroom deal with Larry Scirotto, the city’s former police chief, despite seemingly acknowledging the agreement earlier.

When Gainey announced Scirotto as his nominee for chief in May 2023, the two told City Council and the public that Scirotto would not moonlight as a college basketball referee while leading the police bureau.

But less than a year after Scirotto was hired, he was spotted officating an NCAA game out of state. That sparked outrage among council members who felt they had been lied to before confirming Scirotto as chief.

Gainey at the time said he and Scirotto had agreed the chief would not referee basketball games until homicide rates dropped. Top members of his administration admitted publicly they knew such an agreement had been reached.

But Gainey in a televised debate — and previously during a press conference about the abrupt departure of Scirotto’s replacement — denied the deal. Scirotto resigned Nov. 1, 2024.

“There was never no backroom deal,” Gainey said.

Gainey instead said Scirotto’s partner had to move to Texas for a job, spurring Scirotto’s departure.

O’Connor criticizes Gainey for ‘$31 million for a couple of pickleball courts’

When asked about plans for Downtown during a recent mayoral debate, O’Connor criticized a $31 million outdoor civic space set to be built in the Cultural District.

“I know there’s $31 million going to that new park, $31 million for a couple of pickleball courts,” O’Connor said. “How many people’s lives could we have helped who are unhoused right now?”

He’s referring to a $31 million project known as Arts Landing, a four-acre site that will feature 100 new trees, a band shell for outdoor performances, sprawling green space and playgrounds. Plans also include three pickleball courts.

The $31 million public space isn’t being paid for with city tax dollars that the mayor could direct elsewhere. The project has received $5 million from the county’s Regional Asset District fund, said Derek Scalzott, a spokesperson for the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, which is leading the initiative.

It’s part of a broader $600 million Downtown revitalization effort championed by Gov. Josh Shapiro that aims to create more housing and amenities in the Golden Triangle.

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