Pittsburgh City Council took a politically painful vote in December to raise property taxes 20%, in part because they said the city’s vehicle fleet was in dire need of more investment.
One month later, residents are seeing that need firsthand: The city’s fleet of snow plows buckled under the pressure of a once-a-decade snowfall on Sunday, with 37 trucks breaking down out of about 80, according to the mayor.
Two days after almost a foot of snow fell on the city, many secondary and tertiary roads are still covered, and large piles created by plows on corners and parking lanes have yet to be removed. Continued rough roads that compel crews to focus on snow clearance, plus dangerously low temperatures, convinced the city to cancel trash pickup for the week.
“We were doing a very, very good job until we lost a lot of our equipment,” Mayor Corey O’Connor said Monday morning as city residents came to grips with a largely frozen city road system. He declared an emergency, allowing the city to bring in outside contractors to remove snow. By mid-Monday the number of outside contractor trucks outnumbered city trucks on the roads.
City Controller Rachael Heisler said in an interview Tuesday that the average age of city vehicles is to blame for the breakdowns.
“If your vehicle is older, it goes to the shop more often. That’s true with DPW vehicles,” Heisler said. “They are just breaking down because they are old. It’s happening because we have not invested in our fleet for a really long time.”
A November report from Heisler’s office found that 58% of vehicles in the Public Works Streets Division had exceeded their planned life cycle, and 41% of all Public Works vehicles had done so.
“I would assume there’s probably a Venn diagram of vehicles that have exceeded their recommended lifespan and the vehicles that have broken down” this week, Heisler said.
An example: Heisler said she rode along with a Public Works crew early Monday morning, and a broken windshield wiper forced the truck into the shop for at least 45 minutes.
“If your fleet is doing okay right now, you don’t invest as much as you should,” said Councilor Barb Warwick, who chairs the Committee on Public Works. “What that has resulted in is underinvestment over many, many years.
“We’re getting close to the breaking point.”
Heisler’s report estimated it would take $206 million over five years to fully replenish the city’s vehicle fleet, which would involve replacing 647 vehicles across not only Public Works but fire, police and EMS bureaus and more. Warwick said that level of investment is impossible right now, but she introduced a bill Jan. 9 directing the city to set aside at least $20 million each year for vehicle investments.
That would represent a big increase: The city has allocated an average of about $7.2 million in vehicle spending annually from 2016 to 2025.
Council upped the 2026 proposed budget from $6 million to $16 million using money made available by the tax increase. Warwick’s bill, she said, would lock in even greater investment each year rather than forcing council to make tough, often political, choices on what to fund.
“You need to make the steady investment every year as opposed to rushing” to address emergencies, Warwick said. Her bill “forces that $20 million investment regardless of administration, regardless of City Council, regardless of whatever is in the news.”
The bill has two cosponsors (Councilors Deb Gross and Anthony Coghill) and would need at least five votes to pass. O’Connor’s office did not respond to a request for comment on the mayor’s stance.
Charlie Wolfson is the local government reporter for Pittsburgh’s Public Source. He can be reached at charlie@publicsource.org.
This story was fact-checked by Jamie Wiggan.
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