11/12/2025
Here is my summary of County Council's first 2026 budget hearing held on November 6th, 2025. Members Botta, Filiaggi, Futules, Grzybek, Hallam, Macey, Naccarati-Chapkis, Palmosina, and Walton were present.
During the hearing we heard from the Controller's office, the District Attorney's office, and Pittsburgh Regional Transit. Brief summaries from each are below.
County Controller - Controller O'Connor and Deputy Controller Amy Weiss presented. For those unaware, the Controller is charged with overseeing public spending. The office audits government departments, reviews and approves all county contracts and expenditures, and ensures taxpayer money is used legally and efficiently. The Controller's office requested $8.94M and received $8.8M, which was a 0.4% increase over 2025. The office will be decreasing from 94 to 89 personnel in 2026, which has been achieved by increased employee training and subsequent duty absorption. Among the 2025 highlights for the office was that hotel audits are no longer contracted out, saving roughly $107k/yr. The Public Defender's office, 911 call center, Title V Air Quality Fund, and Department of Human Services were all audited in 2025. The Controller considers his office to be appropriately staffed with the resources it needs to perform its duties for 2025.
District Attorney - Chief of Staff Becky Spangler presented. Of note is that District Attorney Zappala was not present. He was also not present for the presentation last year (or several years prior, per my colleagues). The DA's office is responsible for enforcing state criminal laws within the county. The office works with law enforcement to investigate and prosecute crimes, ranging from minor offenses to serious felonies. The DA's office requested $29.7M and received $26.5M, which was an increase of 3.9% over 2025 (the increase requested would have been 16.5%). During her presentation, Ms. Spangler spoke to the need for more staffing than the office currently has to become involved in cases earlier and adjudicate them in a more timely manner. It is her opinion that the office is chronically understaffed, with people often leaving after 5-8 years, leading to increased burden on the staff they do have. In order to better understand the severity of the office's turnover issue, I asked Ms. Spangler what their attrition rate was. She informed me that the DA's office does not record that information and does not have the staff to do much data tracking. Given my occupation as an Engineer, I stressed the importance of good data tracking to not only understand the severity of the problem, but also to determine the effectiveness of any changes in practice, and offered to help with the calculation of attrition rate (you can view said discussion below).
Pittsburgh Regional Transit - CEO Katharine Kelleman and CFO Donminika Brown presented. Due to the failure of the Pennsylvania State Senate to provide increased funding to PRT following the expiration of Act 89 funding in 2023, PRT has been forced to go to PennDOT for a special exception to use $106.7M in capital funding to support its operating budget. PRT is using a combination of this funding and reserve funds to push off their previously proposed 35% service cut and 9% fare hike for two more years. This will cause some capital projects to be canceled or delated, but no safety critical projects will be impacted. For context, PRT currently has $2B in their backlog for needed repairs. Talks between PRT and the state legislature to make sure we are not in the same predicament in two years are ongoing. PRT's bus line redesign project is currently underway. The goal of this project is to better utilize the resources PRT has available to best meet the needs of its passengers. For example, far less people are commuting Downtown than they were pre-COVID due to more people working from home. As a result, PRT has decreased the number of buses from 600 to 470 since that same surge capacity is no longer needed at rush hour.
Feel free to reach out with any questions, and I'll be back with another update following Wednesday's second hearing.
https://www.youtube.com/live/r_KB5SCMmtY?si=Rv3mxrrdZVQ8esAI&t=4362
