A $1 billion contract to dig a giant sewage storage tunnel along and under the Ohio River is so far slated to steer just a few million to minority-owned businesses, a Public Source investigation has found.
The Allegheny County Sanitary Authority on Tuesday detailed its Ohio River Tunnel project at a public pre-construction meeting at the Allegheny Center Alliance Church. The plan calls for a 5-mile tunnel starting near Heinz Lofts on the Allegheny, running under several North Side neighborhoods, along the Ohio to Marshall-Shadeland and then under the river into McKees Rocks. It’s the first of three giant riverside tunnels, to be followed by digs along the Allegheny and Monongahela, meant to hold mixed rainwater and sewage until the ALCOSAN plant in Marshall-Shadeland can treat it and release it cleanly into the Ohio.
“I think it’s an opportunity for everybody,” said ALCOSAN Executive Director Arletta Williams, in an interview with Public Source at the church. “We’re talking about the first of three tunnels and the first tunnel came in at a billion. If there’s not opportunity there, I don’t know where you can find opportunity. And I think it’s materializing, bit by bit.”
ALCOSAN sets a goal — included in its prime contracts — that 10% to 25% of the dollar value of contracts should flow to subcontractors whose owners are minorities, women or others who are “disadvantaged” — the federal government’s term for any “socially and economically disadvantaged individuals.” Diverse subcontracting is a factor — along with price, qualifications and capacity — in selecting prime contractors, according to the agency.
That 10%-to-25% goal is in the agency’s $1.03 billion contract with Brayman-Lane JV, a joint venture of Saxonburg-based Brayman Construction Corp. and Charlotte-based Lane Construction Corp., recently rebranded as Steel City Tunnel Partners. That joint venture was deemed the lowest responsible bidder among three contestants for the dig, and now chooses its subcontractors.
In ALCOSAN’s contract with Brayman-Lane, the joint venture commits to hitting the floor of the 10%-to-25% range, listing 12 minority-owned, women-owned and disadvantaged firms slated for $104 million in subcontracts. Minorities, though, pick up just a sliver of that.
Brayman-Lane signaled its intent to share the work with:
- Five women-owned business enterprises (WBEs), which are slated to get $92 million to $98 million of work
- Five disadvantaged businesses (DBEs) at $6 million
- Two minority businesses (MBEs) at anywhere from $150,000 to $6 million.
“They’re reaching the bare minimum, so it doesn’t look like there’s a good-faith effort to reach their 25%,” said Toni Silva, a Pittsburgh-based supplier diversity consultant who recently retired from a longtime post as UPMC’s senior director of supplier relations.
“If Black people get 1%, that would be the highest level they could get, that is not acceptable. That is nothing to be running down the street with pompoms about,” said Tim Stevens, chairman of the Black Political Empowerment Project. “When there is a $1.03 billion project and other major projects coming, two other major [tunnel] projects, we want to be at the table. We don’t want to be under the table looking for scraps.”
ALCOSAN leader Williams said she “would love to have MBE, WBE contractors who could do the whole thing and then parse out subs to those who today are majority firms. But that’s not the reality. So we encourage participation and partnerships between primes and eligible subs.”
She said she’s “looking at a variety of numbers. … I think we’re in a good spot. I think there are subs out there that can fulfill — legitimately fulfill — the commitment” to diverse contracting.
The overall MBE, WBE and DBE participation on the tunnel project is lower than that indicated for the other large, ongoing ALCOSAN project: the $346 million construction of a new Wet Weather Pump Station by Mascaro Construction. That contractor indicated plans for 11% total MWDBE involvement in its contract. ALCOSAN said that with construction underway, Mascaro has so far outpaced that pledge with 17% participation of minority- and women-owned businesses.
“In these two major projects where we’re talking a billion dollars, it does not surprise me that the minority participation is this low. Am I happy and satisfied? Absolutely not,” said Jacqueline Hill, president of the Pittsburgh branch of the NAACP. “Now, I am hopeful that the new mayor and the county executive will take this more seriously.”
Public Source reached out to County Executive Sara Innamorato and Pittsburgh Mayor Corey O’Connor — each of whom appoints three of the seven members of the ALCOSAN board. Neither responded with comment. ALCOSAN board Chair Emily Kinkead, a state representative, D-Brighton Heights, declined through a staff member to comment.
ALCOSAN spokesperson Amanda Mueller wrote in response to questions that the projects “have construction schedules of over five years. Because this is a multi-year endeavor, the current percentage should be viewed as a snapshot in time rather than a final measure.”
Two decades in the making
Ohio River Tunnel facts
- 4.9 miles long
- To run from East Allegheny to McKees Rocks
- Construction from 2027 through 2032
- Average annual construction workforce: 1,760
- Downward shafts 15- to 50-feet across
- Tunnels 150’ below the surface
- Horizontal tunnels 14- to 18-feet wide
The billion-dollar tunnel contract issued in April has roots in a 2007 agreement between ALCOSAN and the Department of Justice, which demanded action to reduce what was then the annual overflow of 22 billion gallons of untreated, mixed rainwater and sewage into the three rivers. An associated 271-page consent decree requires ALCOSAN to bring that flow below limits set by the federal Clean Water Act.
That’s easy when it doesn’t rain, but much harder when downpours fill sewers that carry combined wastewater and stormwater to ALCOSAN’s treatment plant. Rain overflows the system, mixing with human waste and spilling into the rivers. Last year, ALCOSAN reported 47 overflows, each time urging people to “minimize contact with waterways.”
The sewer agency serves 83 municipalities including Pittsburgh, and its $3.7 billion, multi-decade strategy to reduce the overflows so far includes two big-ticket items:
- Increasing the plant’s treatment capacity to 600 million gallons per day by 2029, from 250 million gallons last year, which includes the new pump station Mascaro is building
- Preparing to hold mixed stormwater and sewage until it can be treated, in the three riverside tunnels, totaling 16 miles in length.
At the Tuesday meeting in Allegheny Center, Alcosan representatives said they’ve so far reduced the flow of stormwater and sewage into the rivers by 2.9 billion gallons a year, on their way to a total reduction of 7 billion gallons.
WBE expecting ‘meager’ markup
The tunnel project steers the bulk of its diverse contracting commitments to two women-owned firms, at least one of which has a longstanding relationship to one of the two prime contractors.
Madura Steel Sales, with an office in Sharon, is listed for an anticipated $42.4 million in payments for “fabricated structural steel material supply.”
Reached by phone, a Madura representative declined to talk about their involvement in the tunnel project. A Brayman representative declined to make anyone from that firm available for interviews, and did not immediately respond to seven questions sent by Public Source on Oct. 5. A Lane spokesperson said Brayman would be handling all inquiries.
Aspinwall-based Sandra Palone & Associates is slated to be paid $42.8 million for “precast concrete material supply,” according to the contract. Palone’s web page lists Brayman as the WBE’s partner on at least 10 projects — far more than any other listed partner.
Palone in a phone interview said she got to know the Brayman team more than a decade ago. She was working for a firm that went bankrupt, and Brayman bought her employer’s Saxonburg concrete plant. “I did help them reopen the plant,” Palone said, then created her own firm in 2015.
She described her firm as a “microcompany” with no other employees, which would serve as a “resale member” of the tunnel digging team, working on finding the right fabricators to make concrete components for the project.
“I will not be taking in $43 million,” she said. “My markup is meager.”
At least one MBE team is protesting the lack of diversity reflected in the tunnel contract.
Attorney James Baldwin sent an Oct. 5 letter to Innamorato, on behalf of three MBE firms: environmental engineering firm Peer Consultants of Washington, D.C.; construction management and building supply firm Gil Berry and Associates, of McKeesport; and engineering and consulting company TSE & B Consulting, of White Oak.
The McKeesport firm submitted information to all three bidders on the tunnel project, according to the letter, but has received no indication that it will get any work from Brayman-Lane.
ALCOSAN’s contract with Brayman-Lane confirms that the prime contractor reached out to Gil Berry and Associates on Sept. 15, 2025 — the same day the joint venture reached out to at least 60 other MBEs, WBEs and DBEs — got a quote for $5.8 million in trucking services and listed the firm as a “potential future option.”
Baldwin wrote that between 16% and 20% of ALCOSAN ratepayers are minorities. (Allegheny County’s non-white population is around 25%.) “Unless ALCOSAN is forced to change its supplier diversity policies, it is very possible that the largest project in the authority’s history may have little to no MBE participation,” Baldwin wrote.
Other minority-owned contractors reached by Public Source for this story, including two that were considered for work on the tunnel project but not selected, declined to comment.
Pump station’s big MBE contractor is in Maryland
Like Brayman-Lane, North Side-based Mascaro’s chief operating officer signed on to pursue ALCOSAN’s goal to “strive to expend from ten to twenty-fire percent (10-25%) of the total cost of the contract for minority and women’s business enterprise participation.”
Mascaro then listed eight firms that it intended to work with — five minority-owned, three women-owned — which could expect to earn $39 million, or 11% of the total. Minority-owned firms would get the bulk of that, or $30 million.
By far the biggest chunk, nearly $20 million, would go to a minority-owned firm based in White Marsh, Maryland, called Acorn Supply & Distributing. Acorn’s owner, Catherine Schultz, did not respond to multiple emails and phone messages.
R&R Trucking, of Penn Hills, is in line to get $2 million of work from the Wet Weather Pump Station job, according to Mascaro’s contract.
“Shit, $2 million? We probably haven’t gotten $100,000,” R&R owner Damon Givner said in an interview. He said he realized that it’s a multi-year job and he could be called back but he “can’t really say” whether it’ll approach $2 million.
Mascaro did not respond to requests for an interview.
Givner said he owns six trucks, gets work from several large contractors, but has seen his minority status used by primes eager to meet goals. Speaking generally, he said prime contractors “just put you in so they can get approval with the county and stuff like that. … They get a lot of people so that they can say they’re using them, and they’re not even actually being used. ‘Take this little bit of money and we’ll say that we used you.’”
Contracting ‘set asides’ not in vogue
Government efforts to encourage minority-owned businesses date to the 1960s, when there was a recognition that it would take more than bans on discrimination to reverse historic racism. In the 1970s, the federal government swung behind the idea of setting aside percentages of large contracts for MBEs. State and local governments also took up that approach.
Allegheny County, for instance, continues to pursue diversity goals for its contracts, aiming for 13% of the work to go to MBEs and 2% to WBEs.
The City of Pittsburgh sets targets for professional services contracts of:
- 18% MBE
- 7% WBE
- 5% veteran-owned businesses
- 3% LGBTQ+-owned business.
The city’s Urban Redevelopment Authority mirrors the 18% MBE and 7% WBE goals.
President Donald Trump’s administration, though, has barred diversity considerations in federal contracting, as part of its effort to stamp out diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
ALCOSAN’s Williams said of federal hostility to diversity goals: “Nobody has come to me, put a gun to my head and said: ‘Don’t do that.’ … If that were to change, there would be at least on my part a bunch of kicking, screaming and calling foul.”
“Particularly under this new federal administration, DEI and set-asides are all gone now,” said Della Clark, president of The Enterprise Center, a Philadelphia nonprofit that helps small businesses to ramp up. Court decisions have also constrained MBE and WBE programs, requiring extensive analysis of the effects of discrimination before governments can take race-conscious measures. In light of those rulings, said Clark, “I don’t think that will come back for a long time.”
Clark’s organization has shifted its focus to preparing small businesses — notably including MBEs — to improve their finances and ability to borrow and build capacity. But she does not think public agencies should toss out goals to diversify big public contracts.
“You don’t want to see a billion dollars in Pittsburgh that doesn’t flow to a lot of hands and a lot of communities,” she said, noting that MBE involvement in big contracts also leads to mentoring that allows small firms to grow.
“Any time you can have this type of project attached to those types of dollars in the region, that’s significant, because it creates a lot of opportunity for small businesses and mid-sized companies,” said Barãta Bey, president and CEO of the African American Chamber of Commerce of Western Pennsylvania. The ALCOSAN projects are federally mandated, but they’re not federally funded, he noted, and that frees ALCOSAN — a chamber member — to be ambitious.
Bey said he’s seen diverse contracting efforts work in other cities in which he’s worked. “This region? Oh my God. There’s so much room for improvement in that.”
Stevens said a good start would be monthly, public reporting by ALCOSAN of Ohio River Tunnel spending on diverse contractors.
The NAACP’s Hill said diversity in contracting is really about “growing our regional economy. Instead of looking at minority businesses as something we have to do, it needs to be viewed as an economic engine that has not been developed for its full potential.”
Rich Lord is the managing editor at Pittsburgh’s Public Source and can be reached at rich@publicsource.org.
This story was fact-checked by Jamie Wiggan.
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