City Council approves Act 47 budget cuts
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Pittsburgh City Council issued tentative approval yesterday to a raft of bills needed to fully implement the city's recovery plan and keep Pittsburgh's budget reform on track generally.
City Council tentatively approved a bill yesterday shielding janitors, security guards and other service employees from immediate layoffs.
The bill would require owners of large office buildings to keep workers on the job for six months even after switching contractors.
The measure is in response to protests last year when Centre City Towers, Downtown, replaced union janitors with nonunion workers after the union had negotiated new health care benefits.
Building owners and managers complained the bill would be illegal and retard business growth.
"I don't see any increased costs whatsoever," Councilman Alan Hertzberg responded. "All I see here is savings from not having anyone on unemployment."
Council unanimously supported the measure in a voice vote, with a final vote set for Tuesday.
Council approved the overall Act 47 recovery plan 5-4 in June and today approved 30 related legal changes by the same 5-4 tally. A final vote is set for Tuesday.
Most of the changes were rather small, having to do with rules on employee overtime and vacations and wording changes to the city code book. The bills also included new fees for swimming pools, ambulance usage and playing fields, the privatization of the city's garage and the sale of the city's asphalt plant.
All of the changes -- which were required by the city's Act 47 recovery plan -- help add up to $33 million in estimated city spending cuts and other budget changes next year. When the city's separate fiscal oversight board approved Mayor Tom Murphy's $425 million budget for 2005 earlier this month, it also required City Council to approve the Act 47 cuts.
Two council members who expressed reservations with the bills recently -- Gene Ricciardi and Doug Shields -- changed their tune yesterday. Shields raked Act 47 team co-leader Jim Roberts over the coals a few times but eventually said he would "swallow hard and vote for" the changes.
Ricciardi said the plan, while painful, would keep most city workers from facing layoffs. "We save more jobs than we've lost," he said.
The other supporters were Alan Hertzberg, William Peduto and Sala Udin.
Jim Motznik and Len Bodack led fights against the changes, with Bodack forwarding amendments to let the city's unionized mechanics take charge of the garage. The amendments failed.
"We owe something to the people who work here and live here," Bodack said of city workers facing job or benefit cuts under the Act 47 plan. He said council should "take care of the people who take care of us."
Motznik, who represents the city's southern neighborhoods, said he would refuse to acknowledge parts of the plan, such as requirements for athletic leagues to pay increased fees for city playing fields.
"My youth organizations [in District 4] are going to get their fields and they're not going to pay a ... penny," he vowed.
If council issues final approval to the bills next week, the Act 47 team and the Murphy administration will be poised to keep implementing other parts of the plan, including holds on spending on union contracts and increased health care payments by employees.
"This gives us the local authority to implement the plan and we'll be working very hard on it next year," Roberts said of the vote.
Council and the Murphy administration have one more big task ahead -- approval of the 2005 operating budget Murphy issued Nov. 5.
Murphy balanced the budget with a phantom 34 percent property tax increase, which council will likely replace with the revenues from the $52 occupation tax and the new 0.55 employer payroll tax the state Legislature approved early Sunday.
The operating budget must be approved by Dec. 31.
First Published November 24, 2004 12:00 am
