Erin Dalton, the leader of Allegheny County’s sprawling Department of Human Services, will leave her post to take a similar job in New York City.
Dalton had been at ACDHS for 18 years, the first 13 of which she served under longtime Director Marc Cherna. She took over in 2021, leaning into the agency’s strategy of harnessing data to care for the county’s most vulnerable populations.
“[Dalton] has given the majority of her professional career coming up with innovative, data-driven, and compassionate solutions in the human services space to better serve the residents of Allegheny County,” County Executive Sara Innamorato said in a written statement Wednesday. She said she is “terribly disappointed” to lose Dalton.
Deputy Director Alex Jutca, a former economist with a masters degree in public policy, will be interim director after Dalton leaves and the county will conduct a nationwide search for the next permanent director.
As the federal government attempts to reshape the human services landscape, Dalton’s departure raises “very real concerns about a leadership vacuum unable to grapple with the very serious issues facing the county in the wake of sweeping federal funding and policy changes and consequential local decisions such as the current rollout of involuntary outpatient commitment,” said Nev Jones, an associate professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Pittsburgh.
Dalton’s move to New York was first reported by the New York Times.
“Erin Dalton has spent decades proving that government can and must work better for people who rely on it most,” New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani said in a press release Wednesday. “She has expanded access to housing, strengthened social services and protected our most vulnerable neighbors.”
Addressing homelessness
The ACDHS director is one of the most high-profile in county government, helming an agency with an annual budget of more than $1 billion, responsible for helping some of the county’s most vulnerable populations confront homelessness, addiction, mental illness and child abuse.
Her stint as agency leader coincided with a spike in the number of unhoused people in the county and public controversy over how to address encampments and where shelters should be located.
Bethany Hallam, a County Council member who has spent much of her government tenure advocating for unhoused and incarcerated populations, praised Dalton’s work in both areas, particularly in spearheading an initiative to help people living in trail encampments move to other living arrangements.
“She brought together people who, a lot of us had beefed in the past and maybe didn’t work the best together, and she made it work,” Hallam said.
“I think anyone who walks along the trails now can attest to how successful that initiative was. I’m just really happy to have had someone … in a political climate where homelessness has been stigmatized, to have a leader who stepped up and said, ‘no, you will not be sweeping camps, we will make credible offers of housing.’”
Dalton has “approached every challenge with fairness, and a deep sense of resolve to find the best solution,” wrote Jerrel Gilliam, executive director of the Light of Life Rescue Mission, a homeless services agency based in the North Shore, in response to questions from Public Source. “Even when we faced difficult issues or disagreed on the best path forward — particularly regarding homelessness in our county — Erin always listened thoughtfully, treated everyone with respect, and championed collaboration.”
Dalton sat atop the county’s human services system, but also got involved on a granular level, according to Brian Knight, director of community engagement for the Homeless Children’s Education Fund.
Early in her tenure as director, Dalton attended an HCEF event, then reached back to learn more, and eventually plugged the organization into the ACDHS contractor network. That involvement had a concrete result: The hiring by HCEF of a second family engagement coordinator, who works to meet the needs of school students who don’t have stable housing.
“We have a really collaborative county in general,” said Knight, “and I think that Erin really wanted to understand the whole system and had a good understanding of the whole system from a birds-eye view.”
The move comes as New York deals with its own homelessness issues. At least 20 New Yorkers died during cold weather following a January snow storm, the Times reported, and Mamdani sparked controversy by announcing he would resume clearing encampments.
Data analytics
In an email to ACDHS staff announcing her departure, Dalton said the department has become a “national model; something that didn’t go unnoticed by New York City.”
She wrote a list of department accomplishments during her tenure, including the creation of a winter shelter network, advancing the use of predictive analytics in child protection and treating “data as a public good.”
Under Dalton’s leadership, the department built a data warehouse that consolidated data from different systems, including child welfare, behavioral health, the criminal legal system, Medicaid services and services for the unhoused. It was held up as an example for all county governments and studied by Harvard University’s Institute for Excellence in Government, which wrote in a 2020 report that the county had harnessed a “seamless flow of data to improve public service to vulnerable individuals.”
“It really is something special that the rest of the country has acknowledged and recognized,” said Eric Hulsey, the department’s former manager of behavioral health analytics, who was personally recruited by Dalton.
But that national recognition also invited scrutiny. Hulsey noted the department “took a little heat” after WIRED magazine reported in 2018 that its predictive analytics “misdiagnoses child maltreatment and prescribes the wrong solutions.”
And the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Data Analysis Group examined the department’s use of a screening tool to generate a risk score for complaints received through the county’s child maltreatment hotline. In a 2023 report, they explored how the tool — and predictive analytics in general — can disparately punish Black and brown families.
Hulsey is now the executive director of the Institute for Research, Education and Training in Addictions, which is based in downtown Pittsburgh and works to improve systems-level responses to addiction. His contacts who worked in New York City’s social services system and are deeply familiar with its harm reduction programs and substance use services are “excited” about Dalton’s appointment and eager to help her “in any way they can.” But he’s sad that Pittsburgh is losing Dalton and hopes Innamorato “listens to all voices of residents — especially people affected by these systems” — as she chooses Dalton’s replacement.
Highlights from Erin Dalton’s tenure as ACDHS head
December 2020: Marc Cherna announces retirement as head of Allegheny County Department of Human Services. Erin Dalton soon steps into the role, initially on an acting basis.
October 2022: Citing a rise in involuntary mental health commitments, Dalton notes intention to study the effects of “302s” on long-term mental health.
January 2023: The county and City of Pittsburgh continue recent policy of decommissioning homeless encampments, raising concerns among some civil rights groups that constitutional rights may be violated.
June 2023: The department closes the longtime winter shelter at the Smithfield United Church of Christ, Downtown, amid pressure from business interests and against the urging of some advocates for unhoused people.
September 2023: Anti-violence teams, supported by a $50 million county commitment, begin to respond to gun violence incidents with offers of services in an effort to curb retaliatory shootings.
June 2024: The county announces the 500-in-500 campaign to identify deeply affordable housing for people experiencing homelessness over roughly 18 months.
August 2024: The department launches Connect Protect Recover to address rising overdose deaths in Black communities in part by supporting the loved ones and caregivers of people with substance use disorders.
February 2025: Dalton, Innamorato and other county officials say the 500-in-500 plan — at the halfway mark in its timeline — had to that point resulted in 191 more available housing units for people dealing with housing insecurity.
May 2025: Pittsburgh’s Public Source reports that the county plans to implement Assisted Outpatient Treatment (AOT), a model of outpatient court-ordered mental health care that has been used in other states, but not previously in Pennsylvania.
July 2025: The county and research partners release results of a study indicating that involuntary mental health hospitalizations often do more harm than good to patients.
November 2025: Dalton details plans for the county’s winter shelter, anchored by a 140-bed facility in Perry South. The county notes that its count of people living in tents has dropped from around 140 in 2024 to two.
December 2025: ACDHS reveals that it would implement AOT, but with newly crafted safeguards in place to prevent the tool from leading to incarcerations of people with mental health problems.
Charlie Wolfson is the local government reporter for Pittsburgh’s Public Source. He can be reached at charlie@publicsource.org.
Venuri Siriwardane is PublicSource’s health and mental health reporter. She can be reached at venuri@publicsource.org or on Bluesky @venuri.bsky.social.
Rich Lord contributed.
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