Creative Math with Ed Gainey
Pittsburgh City Paper hath risen
Happy Spring(ish), Pittsburgh!
I’m sure you can imagine that if I disappear for so long a stretch, things have been hectic.
A few evenings ago, I gave a history talk at the Duquesne Club about Pittsburgh’s Great Fire of 1845. Andrew Masich, the president and CEO of the Heinz History Center, was tasked with introducing me. So, a couple of things … first, in keeping with my brand of “this event you’ve known about for months is in five hours and you haven’t even considered if you have anything appropriate to wear,” I donned an $8 used sweater from Poshmark and dress pants I snagged at this trendy boutique named El Club de Sam—it’s very exclusive; you’ve probably never heard of it.
Second, as Andy ran down the list of who I am, what I’ve done, and what I’m currently working on, I stood there to the side and said to myself, “Damn, girl. Aren’t you tired?”
I’m a little tired! But let’s chat.
1. How to lie with numbers and almost get away with it
If anyone needs to be wearing $8 used Poshmark sweaters that still manage to look cute, it’s the City of Pittsburgh, because, as it turns out, her finances are a hot mess.
There have been lots of articles written about this mess, but let me sum up the saga for you, because it’s important we understand what is going on, how we got here and what hope, if any, we have of digging our way out. I’m going to do this like you’re five to ten years old. Not as an insult to your intelligence, but because budgets are adjacent to math and I think we all know how I feel about math.
Here’s basically what happened. Old Mayor’s administration has to make a budget for the next year. Old mayor is heading out the door due to not being reelected, so he’s basically creating two things:
1. A budget that his replacement will inherit
2. A budget that will hopefully make his administration look like it had been fiscally responsible and is leaving the city on strong financial ground
You don’t want to leave office in a financial hole, especially not when the voters kicked you out and especially not when you’re mayor of a city that previously spent years under Act 47 oversight. No, you want to go out on a high note, as if to say, “Hey, your loss. We did our jobs and we’re leaving the city in good shape. Peace!”
This goes without saying, but, politicians care deeply about legacy.
Okay, so Old Mayor’s team looks at the budget and has to plug in new numbers for the next year’s budget in a way that, hopefully, when the spreadsheet does the math there’s a positive number in the final total field—as opposed to a big fat red negative number that kicks them in the teeth.
This is a basic accounting concept: positive dollars in the bank is good; negative dollars in the bank is you better get your butt on Poshmark and look for $8 sweaters, my guy. And also, your mom (the state) might step in and say, “From now on, I need to pre-approve all of your sweater purchases until you can show me you know how to stick to a damn budget.”
Still with me? Need a juice box, Lukey?
Wow, that was a throwback.
Okay, so what appears to have happened is Old Mayor’s Administration, which from heretoforeafter we will call, for shits and giggles, the Gainey admin, plugged in realistic numbers and the total left at the bottom of the spreadsheet was a BIG FAT RED NUMBER. As in, if things happen the way they will likely happen and we spend the money we are likely to spend, we are going to end up with a deficit, i.e. negative dollars.
Dollars are so much more fun and powerful when they are dollars that exist.
Let me explain budgeting to you as a person who once held a job creating programmatic budgets for nonprofits until she revealed her identity and got fired for it … it’s SUPER EASY TO LIE WITH BUDGETS. OMG it’s so easy, you guys. The dirty little open secret is this: you just … change the numbers. Because the numbers, you see, are still theoretical at this point in the game, so you work backwards from what you want that final number to show. You get creative. Except in the nonprofit case, you’re actively TRYING to create a red number so the foundations will take pity on you and give you money.
In creating a budget for a city, you just … fudge the numbers the other way. Oh, this average $x million in overtime pay we end up with every year? We’ll just pretend we’re not paying any overtime in 2026. You change that number to 0 and boom! The big red number magically moves closer to green.
All of our plow trucks are going to fail within two years? Oh well, let’s just remove this $x million on new equipment and pretend the trucks are fine and they’ll last. Boom. The big red number magically moves even CLOSER to green.
You keep doing this line by line until, you guessed it, BOOM! The number is green and you have a budget that is “balanced.”
You look good and your legacy is intact. That’s essentially (albeit super dumbed down), how it appears the Gainey admin did the city budget that the O’Connor admin would have to work with.
You’ll remember that when Gainey first presented his outgoing budget in 2025, City Council immediately recognized it wasn’t reasonable and raised taxes to cover what they knew was going to be a shortfall. This, dear reader, is exactly what it sounds like—City Council saying to Ed Gainey and his budgetary witches…
Of course, the Gainey admin claimed (and continues to claim) their numbers were realistic. Spoiler alert: no they weren’t and it’s kind of remarkable they continue to lie like this. (Please don’t email me if you worked on the Gainey admin’s budget. I cannot express how deeply little I wish to hear your excuses or justifications. I’ve built too many budgets, my guy. I know the tricks.)
It gets even worse. Now that the O’Connor admin has their people in there, and now that they’ve gone deep into the budget, the finances, the accounts payable/receivable, etc., and have access to the budgeting software, it appears that the Gainey budget was an even bigger lie than previously understood.
The additional lie is this: the Gainey admin intentionally didn’t pay a huge chunk of invoices in order to further substantiate their budgetary lies, saddling the incoming administration with these bills. To dumb it down again … rather than having a deeper BIG RED NUMBER hole to dig out of, they made it a shallower hole by keeping invoices off the books by … simply not paying them.
Let me illustrate this way of lying with accounting: if your bank account says you have $3,000, but you KNOW your mortgage is $1,500 and it’s due at the end of the month, you know in your heart of hearts that on March 31, you really have $1,500 dollars in the bank. But if you decide to simply not pay the mortgage until, let’s say, April 2, well then at the end of March, you can say proudly, “I have $3,000 in the bank.” It might be true, but it’s not REALLY TRUE. It’s only air-quotes-true. You’re lying with accounting. You’re lying with numbers. You’re lying with math.
That’s what the Gainey admin appears to have done.
All this to say, Pittsburgh, we are in a giant hole even though the Gainey admin tried to sell us the lie that there was no hole at all. This is big fat red news. So big, in fact, that City Council has taken the rare step of reopening the already approved budget for modifications to hunt for ways to get the numbers to be at least within shouting distance of realistic.
You guys know I’m hard on mayors. It was once my entire frickin’ brand, right, Lukey? I criticized Peduto when it was called for. I generally never had to go after Gainey until very late in his term when the whole police chief drama happened and he kind of went haywire in a press conference and the “oh, you are NOT going to get reelected” writing appeared on the wall.
Thus far, O’Connor has surprised me in some very positive ways. City government experience aside, I expected him to just kind of be playacting mayor, if I’m being honest. Like a kid sitting in his dad’s big desk chair pretending to read important papers. Remember I did the math on the snow plows and that math computed out to basically displaying BOOBIES in the calculator window? I couldn’t even comprehend how he was going to rise above the math when we got two feet of snow in January. So I expected him to fall flat on his face right out of the mayoral gate. Instead he hunted for private snow-removal contractors and got local corporations to fund the purchase of a few new plows. Bandaids, yes, but, dear reader, I didn’t even realize he had access to a first aid kit.
In light of what he’s done thus far, his transparency in sharing what he’s now up against (which is basically having his mayoral honeymoon phase pulled out harshly from under him), I’m going to optimistically say this and hope he doesn’t prove me wrong and then force me to write a long “Dear Mayor O’Connor” open letter in two years that ends with something like, “Lick rust. Sincerely, PittGirl”: I think he’s the right person to lead us out of this financial mess.
Yes, your faithful Pittsburgh blogger, writer, columnist, grand dame of snark and kicking pigeons while wearing stuff she bought at Marshall’s, is saying this: Make no mistake. Things are bad financially for the City of Pittsburgh. We are in a ship with its bow pointed directly into a monster storm, but we at least appear to have a capable captain at the helm.
Grab some Dramamine and hold on to your butts. It’s going to be an interesting couple of years. I’m rooting for our mayor.
2. AI can’t handle these Pittsburgh streets
In some ways, generative AI has greatly improved from its early days, but in other ways, it still simply cannot get a handle on Pittsburgh. I just had to share with you this fake AI profile on Threads which is obviously attempting to catfish lonely local men in order to scam them.
Holy topographical hallucinations, Batman!*
Roads that lead directly to the river level downtown? A neighborhood where PNC Park used to be? The incline and Mount Washington just absolutely picked up and moved to the the North Side? The Fort Pitt Bridge where the Fort Duquesne Bridge used to be? One of the Steelers logos is missing an S, and there’s a Steelers logo on a shirt featuring the Roberto Clemente Bridge, which makes no sense. And don’t even get me started on whatever this is.
Though I’ll tell you what this is. This is AI going, “Hmmm, Pittsburgh, steel, industry, machines, Steelers, Steely McBeam, iron, steel, bridges, steel, [Chewbacca sounds], embroidered steel beams on shirts with a random gear! Yes! That screams ‘Pittsburgh!’”
You’d think with so many clues revealing this person does not exist in Pittsburgh, let alone on this actual Earth, this scammer would catch no fish. You would be super super wrong:
God bless Joe Woos for calling it out (and for my pal, Pittsburgh’s own Jim Lokay who also called it out, which is how I found it). Anyway, check in with the men in your life and explain to them how to spot AI before they wire their entire life savings to some 47-year-old scammer in Russia.
*not a euphemism
3. The Second Coming of Pittsburgh City Paper
Word is just hitting that Pittsburgh City Paper has new local owners and it will resume online and print publishing!
We’ll be back on all our beats: community-centered news, politics, protests, up-and-coming art, counterculture, events, food finds, opinionated rants, undie runs, jagoffs, and perhaps our favorite: roving adults-only vans. (IYKYK) Soon you can once again scroll through our newest stories, or get outside and find our latest issue at your corner coffee shop or bus stop. Wherever you are, we’re there, too.
We’re bolstered with new, local ownership, new ideas, and a new strategy that prioritizes the needs of our neighbors — with accountability, sustainability, and creative new projects.
This is remarkably good and unexpected news. Though this is where I immediately want to know who bought it. Luckily, the Trib has those details:
Under the new agreement, Pittsburgh-based nonprofit LocalMatters is the majority owner of a for-profit entity called Pierogi Press LLC, which operates City Paper. LocalMatters is designed to help local news organizations become self-sustaining.
On Wednesday, Trachta and Chris Maury, who is affiliated with Pierogi Press LLC, declined to disclose the purchase price of City Paper.
Maury is a former engineering manager for Apple who reached out to City Paper’s editorial team to start the process. When asked about the terms of the of the sale, he said this.
“(The Block family) recognize that the dollars going to the Blocks are dollars that are not going to the longevity and kind of the funding necessary to see City Paper to a successful place, and so the terms of the deal reflect that,” Maury said to TribLive.
LOL. I’ve read it six times and that is an extra large word salad prepared by that chaotic Muppet chef who likes to really make the lettuce and french fries fly.
One thing I’m taking from this positive news is that if the Blocks were persuaded by cash-dollah-bills to sell the City Paper, maybe they’re still willing to sell the P-G. This nonprofit model is essentially what Kevin Acklin has been trying to make happen, but seemingly with no headway. I guess for now we just hold out hope until the last ember is stomped out by the Block family, who I continue to maintain can go lick rust. Respectfully.
4. Big PastFinders news, so don’t skip this one, you jags!
I know I’ve been talking to you about Pittsburgh Remains to be Seen/PastFinders for around three years now, but BIG NEWS. The app was officially launched at the Pittsburgh Film Office’s Oscar gala this past weekend!
You can hop into the PastFinders app and explore over 100 filming locations scattered around the city, from The Dark Knight Rises to Silence of the Lambs to Southpaw to Perks of Being a Wallflower to Jack Reacher and more. There are walking tours you can take in-person or virtually with more coming soon. Each location includes photos of that spot in the film.
I have also begun building walking tours in Allegheny Cemetery!
My daughter and I took the one I built recently and had a whole blast. I was very careful with dropping GPS points for this tour so that you literally CANNOT not find the grave marker you’re looking for.
How cool is that?? Go take a walk and visit graves such as Josh Gibson, Jane Grey Swisshelm, some mayors and more. Just watch out for the geese. They truly believe they own the entire grounds. They’re just fat, tall, schematically organized pigeons, to be honest. You can also take this tour (and any tour in the app) virtually!
Download the app on Apple or Android if you haven’t already. If you were an early adopter, please look at all we’ve built and changed and improved over the past year, and even just the past three months.
Group hug!
5. Random n’at
Big local things presented as little listy things:
The Western Pennsylvania Sports Museum is now the Franco Harris Sports Museum. Love this!
The city continues to redd up before the NFL Draft, and that includes all the litter that you have been noticing lately now that the winds have died down and the snow has melted and there is trash every. where. This is a great time to jump onboard Allegheny Cleanways’ Immaculate Collection campaign which is now in full swing and relies on the whole city to pitch in and pick up. Explore the site for all the ways you can help! (Full disclosure: not an ad. I sit on their board’s development committee as an independent member because I’M SICK OF ALL THE LITTER, YOU GUYS.)
Alternate Histories has a new-ish locally printed, locally designed (by artist Fio Avocado) tote bag that features the Monongahela Monster attacking the Smithfield Street Bridge and I love it so much. Not an ad!
You must must must go see Eureka Day at Pittsburgh City Theatre. It is so good and is the hardest I have laughed in a theater in my life. Legitimately that hilarious. Not an ad. Support local theater! It’s here until March 29.
I know it seems like right when the pandemic hit, I stopped talking about Make Room for Kids at Mario Lemieux Foundation. This is me telling you that we never stopped working on it and that I’m going to be sharing some wonderful news with you soon! For now, one thing we did recently was gift Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh’s transplant unit with a new 50-inch TV and cart that can be wheeled to the bedside of transplant patients who, for medical reasons, cannot move to a position that allows for them to game or watch television. How great is that! We’re told staff and patients on 7B are thrilled.
The cart and television donated to the transplant unit at Children’s/Nancy Angus (right), president and CEO of the Mario Lemieux Foundation, presenting the gifts to CHP staff Another group hug!
6. Wrap up!
That’s all, yinz! Have a wonderful week, weeks, month, etc. Be kind! Support local businesses, artists, groups, organizations, peeps, and events! Get the PastFinders app, you jags. Buy my book! Don’t litter!
And be sure to come out this weekend and see my new band Ed Gainey and the Budgetary Witches. Tickets only cost $2! We swear!
Don’t look at your receipt!