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City's year colored by race for mayor
Wednesday, December 27, 2000 By Timothy McNulty, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
For Grant Street political junkies, every city government issue this year was seen through the prism of the mayor's race, from the intricacies of the Fifth-Forbes and Lazarus development deals to the $10 swimming pool tags paid by city kids. On nearly every issue, Mayor Tom Murphy was on one side and City Council President Bob O'Connor was on the other, circling each other like wary boxers in a ring, and trying to appeal to different constituencies and supporters in the crowd.
Editor's note: Baumhammers, Taylor, Cornelius. New county government. Fifth-Forbes. Road construction, and more road construction. New stadiums. This has been a year of nonstop local news stories.
To wrap up the old and preview the new, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette staffers have prepared a series of articles that recap what happened and lay out what's to come in 2001.
Starting next month and going through the Democratic primary in May, they'll finally exchange blows, reprising their 1997 primary battle.
Both Murphy and O'Connor have been meeting with neighborhood leaders, raising funds and telling supporters they're set to run for mayor, though neither has formally announced it. That is expected to happen at some time in the middle of January. Other key dates follow.
Starting next week, some residents will get a very close-up look at the race. For instance, it will be very possible to hear a knock at the door, ask who it is and have a guy answer, "Tom Murphy." And he won't be kidding. Murphy has already held neighborhood parties and coffees and is now going door-to-door.
On Jan. 31, the campaigns will submit their 2000 campaign finance reports to the Allegheny County Elections Department, showing their fund-raising and spending through the entire year. The reports will provide a peek at the candidate's main supporters and the campaign consultants they employ to help them.
The campaigns will likely hold off as much spending as they can until after Dec. 31 -- the last day of the reporting period -- to make their war chests seem as big as possible.
In mid-February, several hundred Democratic party leaders will meet to endorse one of the candidates by secret ballot. Murphy won the endorsement in 1997 by 441 votes to O'Connor's 284. The endorsement is important in Pittsburgh, where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 5-1, but it doesn't guarantee victory.
Between the endorsement and the primary are debates. Murphy's aides say the mayor, a former seminarian and neighborhood activist, should perform well in the debates against O'Connor, a former restaurant executive.
Murphy, 56, has been mayor since 1994 and is seeking his third term in the office, which does not have term limits. O'Connor, 56, has been on council since 1992 and been council president, a largely ceremonial job, since 1998.
In April, one month before the primary, PNC Park will open. Though Murphy has never been a big fan of organized sports, he has fought since his first term to keep the Pirates in town and led the roller-coaster campaign for stadium financing.
Murphy's support of the $514 million stadium projects made friends for him among sports fans, the franchises, construction firms and building trades, but the projects remain controversial. O'Connor nearly rode anti-stadium sentiment into office in 1997 and is likely to raise the topic .
On May 1, two weeks before the primary, city Controller Tom Flaherty is scheduled to release his preliminary audit of 2000 city finances. The draft of the Comprehensive Annual Financial Report gauges the size of the city's fund balance and the city's debt, and is always a politically tinged report, especially in an election year.
This year, Flaherty used the report to reproach Murphy for the size of the city's $982 million debt, which at $2,655 per person, was one of the highest per-capita debt figures in the country. The controller has since patched things up with Murphy -- even acting as master of ceremonies for the mayor's holiday party earlier this month -- and may release a kinder draft of the audit in May.
For instance, the report Flaherty released in 1997 lauded Murphy for "bringing serious stability" to the 1996 city budget and giving the city its first surplus in six years. O'Connor then dismissed the report as "smoke and mirrors" and "cooking the books."
Perhaps looking forward to the release of Flaherty's report next year, the Murphy administration left the $39 million fund balance untouched in the 2001 city budget, although council later took $1.8 million from it.
The primary is May 15. The general election is set for Nov. 7.
Murphy likes bond ratings
Throughout the spring, look for Murphy to continually praise the two bond-rating upgrades the city received last month from Standard & Poor's and from Fitch Inc. He sees them as independent validations of his attempt to build the city tax base through development -- a point noted by S&P in particular.
But O'Connor is suspicious of the upgrades, saying they were arranged by the city's financial advisers, PNC Capital Markets. Council has hired its own financial advisor, Greg Zappala of RRZ Public Markets in Cranberry, in part to counterbalance PNC.
O'Connor can also be expected to hammer away continually at the federal investigation of the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority and try to make connections in the public mind between the authority and Murphy.
The authority's board is appointed by the mayor and he has distanced himself from the scandal. But one of the mayor's closest advisers -- Sports & Exhibition Authority Director Steve Leeper -- took the lead in the sudden firings last week of four of the authority's top managers. Leeper said the firings were not related to the federal probe.
Sharon L. Antonucci, owner of a Homestead company called LMD Inc., was indicted last month on 13 counts of mail fraud for overbilling the PWSA for cleaning catch basins and dumping debris. Antonucci, 48, of Hampton, has pleaded not guilty.
Also watch for Murphy and O'Connor to attempt a rather bizarre swap of personalities. Murphy, always serious and driven, is attempting to seem more human and even fallible, while O'Connor, always outgoing and warm, is attempting to seem more savvy and supportive of economic development deals.
Murphy's support swelled this year, an aide said, when he showed uncharacteristic humility during two highly publicized moments: first, his tearful call for help in solving the September murder of 11-year-old Scott Drake of the North Side, who had friends in common with Murphy's own 10-year-old son; and second, his decision to admit his controversial Fifth-Forbes plan was going down the tubes in November after 41/2 years of work.
Oddly, to this day Murphy and his aides continue to recall, almost gleefully, how he "ate crow" when Fifth-Forbes tanked.
O'Connor has always questioned Murphy's use of such development tools as tax increment financing and loans from the Pittsburgh Development Fund, and he will continue to note the animosity created by the mayor's Fifth-Forbes plan. But unlike his 1997 run, he will not simply run against Murphy's proposals, but in favor of some of his own.
He wasn't ready to reveal those proposals in an interview yesterday. But O'Connor said he will not run against Murphy's redevelopment initiatives, as some may expect. Instead, he'll run against Murphy's handling of the projects and how the mayor's lieutenants at the Urban Redevelopment Authority, the Sports & Exhibition Authority and elsewhere set up the deals.
"The concepts aren't all bad but the deals are very one-sided. They don't look out for the best interest of the taxpayers," O'Connor said. "We're for a lot of stuff, who's going to pay for it?"
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