In Dormont, officials are considering a major redevelopment around the Red Line station that could bring 180 apartments, including affordable housing, to what is now a park-and-ride.
Like many large development proposals, it has drawn competing visions for the borough just south of Pittsburgh. Supporters see an opportunity to add housing near public transit as rents rise. Opponents have raised concerns about traffic, taxes, density and the borough’s residential character.
But as the debate has intensified, it has acquired another complication: false and misleading information has circulated among opponents of the project. Some of those claims were then amplified by an organizer who says she relies on artificial intelligence in her advocacy.
One claim in particular has taken hold — that developer Pennrose is seeking a 45-year property tax exemption.
It isn’t.
No tax break has been sought, and it is unclear whether one will be. The tax-abatement program cited as the basis for the claim has a 10-year limit.
The misinformation has nonetheless spread. Residents have repeated versions of the claim at public meetings, while the borough has created a frequently asked questions page in an effort to correct inaccuracies.
Experts say social media and AI can lower barriers to civic participation while also making it easier for inaccurate information to spread.
“All of these things are a double-edged sword. They can be great ways for residents to engage with government and understand government better,” said Beth Schwanke, executive director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Institute for Cyber Law, Policy and Security. “But it also comes with problems.”
Rising rents and a tightening housing market
The development would be built at the existing Dormont Junction park-and-ride through a partnership among Pittsburgh Regional Transit, the borough and Pennrose, LLC, a Philadelphia-based developer whose affordable and senior housing projects include The Avenue Apartments in Braddock.
Preliminary plans call for three six-story, mixed-use buildings with 180 units, including 113 units for residents making 80% of the average median income or below. An adjacent project would also revamp the station, make traffic infrastructure improvements and construct an underground garage with 162 parking spaces.
Dormont is among Allegheny County’s most densely populated municipalities, with just over 8,200 residents. Its housing stock is also old: 96% of its homes were built before 1980. Rows of Tudor, Colonial and American Foursquare houses line parts of the borough.
“Given rising rents and a tightening local housing market, the currently underutilized Dormont Junction [transit] site presents an attractive opportunity for new, forward-thinking, residential development,” a PRT planning document says.
Borough council has so far committed only to determining whether the Dormont Junction proposal is “feasible for the community and its partners.”
Opposition surfaced quickly.
“This proposal is insane.”
Robert Dini, Dormont Resident
At the council’s mid-May supercommittee meeting discussing the project, six of the seven speakers opposed it. They raised concerns about traffic and the affordable housing requirement, which they said limits the borough’s tax intake from the property.
Dormont resident Robert Dini said the borough’s residential character could be affected by a large influx of renters, asserting that it could lower property values.
Nearly two-thirds of Dormont households are owner-occupied.
“This proposal is insane,” Dini said. “Tear it up. Start all over. You absolutely must have condos or townhouses with [a] commercial component to it. Anything else is criminal.”
Other concerns have focused on the site itself. At least one person has raised questions about the potential environmental impacts of building the parking garage above the former Mansfield Mine. Bobby Hughes, executive director of the Eastern Pennsylvania Coalition for Abandoned Mine Reclamation, said building over abandoned mines requires extra due diligence by developers, such as commissioning mine maps.
The project also has supporters. Daniel Webb, who has lived in Dormont since 2018 and formerly worked for Habitat for Humanity, told council in August that he was tentatively supportive because he is “morally in favor of affordable housing.”
An opposition campaign and a 45-year claim
As the proposal moved through municipal government, an organized campaign against it formed online and at borough meetings.
Madelyn Joy Smith, a Mt. Lebanon resident who grew up in Dormont, has emerged as one of its most visible organizers. She created a petition to halt the project that has garnered more than 800 signatures and a fundraising campaign that has raised nearly $1,500 for a “neighborhood defense billboard.” She also organized a gathering before the borough’s Aug. 3 meeting.
Although not a Dormont resident, Smith wrote that she “cares deeply about the safety, character and future of our shared neighborhood borders.”
Smith told Pittsburgh’s Public Source that she uses Google Gemini when drafting Facebook posts and other documents related to the project. She said she asks it questions and uses it to store information for her notes.
“I don’t use complex scripts or custom coding. I treat the chatbot like a conversational research and writing partner,” she wrote in an email. “Essentially, it acts as a digital sounding board to help me clean up my notes, draft community templates and keep my local volunteer strategy organized.”
Some claims Smith and other opponents have circulated about the project have been inaccurate or have conflated separate proposals.
Materials distributed at the August event, for example, warned that the development would “permanently alter regional traffic flow” and relied on a “hidden ‘road diet’ lane reduction plan” along West Liberty Avenue.
Pennrose’s preliminary plan makes no changes to West Liberty. A separate 2025 borough comprehensive plan recommends converting the existing four-lane road into three lanes with a dedicated turning lane, but the plan is unrelated to the housing development and is not legally binding. Any roadway changes would require a separate borough process.
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The most prominent disputed claim has centered on property taxes.
The petition and August gathering focused on what campaign materials called an “unprecedented 45-year real estate tax exemption” for Pennrose that would “contribute zero standard property taxes to the Keystone Oaks school district.”
At the borough meeting that August evening, Dormont resident Bob Dawe gave public comment: “If you’re going to give these people an easement for 40 years, who is going to pay their tax burden for them? The answer is we are.”
But the developer has not sought a tax break, and it is unclear whether it will.
Smith said she was referring to a Local Economic Revitalization Tax Assistance Act abatement, or LERTA. Such programs allow taxing bodies to abate taxes on the increased assessed value of a property for up to 10 years, with the abatement decreasing by 10% each year.
Smith and others have said such an abatement would strain the Keystone Oaks School District’s budget. The district recently approved a 3.5% tax increase — the largest allowed by law — to help pay a bond used to fund elementary school renovations.
Allegheny County Economic Development Director Lauren Connelly said the county has received no formal application for a LERTA, tax-increment financing or another tax-diversion tool for the project.
“[Dormont] is full of ma and pa stores. It’ll ruin them. They’ll end up all leaving.”
Joy Smith, Mt. Lebanon Resident
Dormont Borough Council President Amie Downs said a LERTA is not actively being considered but “could become a part of the conversation.”
Keystone Oaks School District said in a July 31 statement that it is not involved with the project.
Pennrose spokesperson Lizzy Leer said the company is “working with PRT and the Borough of Dormont to evaluate all available resources to ensure a sustainable, high-quality transit-oriented development.”
Smith said the 45-year figure was a “misstatement” and also that she did not originate it. She pointed Public Source to an earlier Facebook post by another resident that described “45 years of tax deferment.” She said neighborhood discussion had conflated the project’s longer-term ground lease with a possible tax abatement.
Public Source confirmed that the earlier post contained the 45-year claim, but could not establish that the figure originated from confusion over the ground lease. Smith later incorporated the 45-year figure into her own petition and campaign materials.
Smith also directed Public Source to a 2019 PRT transit-oriented development planning document. Dormont was not involved with the document. LERTA appears once in the report, among a list of potential county and state tax incentives. The report notes the program’s 10-year limit.
“The borough’s mythbusting page is playing word games with this neighborhood typo to avoid talking about the real 10-year LERTA recommendation,” Smith wrote in a message.
Smith said she’d still oppose the project without a LERTA abatement, saying that it would take away from the “charm” of Dormont.
“A huge, big complex just won’t work in a little town like this,” she said. “[Dormont] is full of ma and pa stores. It’ll ruin them. They’ll end up all leaving.”
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When AI enters civic debate
Downs said residents’ reliance on information gathered through AI has made it harder for the borough to correct misunderstandings about the project.
“It does seem like people are just putting things into an AI bot to get some information … now, maybe that’s being too obtuse about it,” Downs said. “People just start talking and they don’t understand the information. [The AI is] not educating them.”
Generative AI such as Gemini, ChatGPT and Claude create new content based on patterns in existing information. They can also produce incorrect information, sometimes called “hallucinations.”
“You can’t just hand it all over to AI and have it do everything.”
Karen Mossberger, Arizona State university
Schwanke said that risk can be particularly relevant when people ask AI about new events or projects for which relatively little public information is available.
Dormont is not the only Allegheny County municipality seeing AI enter civic participation.
Tarentum Borough Manager Dwight Boddorf said the borough has seen a “notable increase” in residents using AI to draft emails, complaints and Right-to-Know requests. Some communications have cited laws that do not exist, treated requirements from other states as applicable in Pennsylvania or mixed together facts from different municipalities, he said. Correcting those assertions can make responding to residents more difficult and time-consuming.
Karen Mossberger, a professor emerita at Arizona State University’s School of Public Affairs who studies information technology and policy, said AI can lower barriers to civic participation by helping people organize, write to officials and navigate government.
The problem comes when people rely on it to determine the underlying facts.
“You can’t just hand it all over to AI and have it do everything,” Mossberger said. “It’s the information side that’s the most problematic.”
An unsettled project
The Dormont Junction project is the first of five transit-oriented development projects PRT plans as part of an effort to boost ridership and create housing near existing transit lines. Others are planned around stations in Carnegie, Wilkinsburg, Brushton and the South Hills.
The agreement between Dormont and its partners lays out a period of six months to two years in which the borough and Pennrose would discuss issues including traffic, taxes and the development’s design and scope.
The borough is reviewing PRT’s agreement with Pennrose. Downs did not provide a timeline for the borough’s approval of the agreement.
The Dormont Junction project shares a $14 million budget with a planned Station Square station revamp. PRT has not yet determined how much of that funding would go toward each project.
Dormont resident Webb said misinformation circulating online prompted him to attend the August council meeting and speak publicly about the project. It was the first council meeting he had attended.
“The idea that it could be derailed before we actually know the facts … is concerning to me. I don’t know what public good could survive this process,” he said. “How do you respond to that as a member of your community?”
Lucas Dufalla is the Southern Communities reporter at Pittsburgh’s Public Source and can be reached at lucas@publicsource.org.
This story was fact checked by Feixu Chen.
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