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Residents of the affluent district are questioning the lack of public deliberation by the school board, leading to concerns about potential violations of state open meeting and ethics laws.
“Much of what I heard today was the same sort of fight that brought me here to council, that I was fighting 20 years ago,” said Pittsburgh City Council President Bruce Kraus. “It was protect the integrity and the sweat equity of generations of homesteaders that made that piece of real estate ripe for development.”
PublicSource will report here about notable actions and conversations from the meetings of the City of Pittsburgh’s Planning Commission. The meetings are held at 2 p.m. on every other Tuesday on the 1st floor of the Civic Building at 200 Ross Street.
Hacker, the county’s highest paid employee with a salary of more than $220,000, said she thinks she should be judged on the progress she’s helped to usher in, including reduced lead poisoning in children, fewer opioid overdose deaths and a steady decline in air pollution that is on the verge of coming into compliance with the law.
But a number of constraints made the work difficult.
As part of Develop PGH, PublicSource will report here about notable actions and conversations from the monthly meetings of the Urban Redevelopment Authority [URA]. The meetings are held the second Thursday of each month in the Wherrett Room on the 13th floor at 200 Ross Street. For the Urban Redevelopment Authority, 2019 has been a year of rolling out long-awaited programs to address a lack of affordable housing, and today those efforts have garnered support from state officials who awarded Low Income Housing Tax Credits [LIHTC] to five projects in Pittsburgh. The program, administered by the Internal Revenue Service, offers coveted tax incentives to developers who build below-market housing units in exchange. According to a press release from Mayor Bill Peduto's office, the five LIHTC awards comprise "the largest number of Pittsburgh developments to receive the low-income tax credits in memory."
Pennsylvania has already identified at least 23 sites of PFAS contamination, and officials are struggling to address the threat of contaminated drinking water throughout the state. A DEP spokesperson told EHN that given the agency’s limited resources, the Pennsylvania PFAS Action Team hasn’t even begun to consider tackling potential food contamination yet.
The organization, dubbed ‘the heart of the Hill,’ faced major funding challenges for more than a decade. Some efforts to adapt backfired.
From 2017 to 2018, I investigated the opioid crisis in Southwestern Pennsylvania while my father was homeless in Pittsburgh. He was dying in the street as I wrote about others experiencing the same reality.
We set out to hear the realities and perceptions of people working in low-wage industries in the Pittsburgh region. Here’s what we learned.
About 14% of poor white people in Pittsburgh lived in high-poverty neighborhoods (those with 30% poverty or more), but a staggering 59% of poor black people did, according to an analysis I completed using data from 2017 American Community Survey estimates. These trends are alarming.
