The Race for Mayor: Peduto says he's unfazed by critics and doubters: "Those communities are the chief targets of his effort, quarterbacked from his crowded headquarters at the cusp of the Strip District. There, the results of his team's door-knocking and phone calls are entered into computers nightly, and charted by a geographic information system program. Peduto's Saturday foray into Beechview strayed from his focus communities. But those neighborhoods can't be ignored, because a special election for its state Senate seat contest is expected to spur an unusually high local turnout. That race, between state Rep. Michael Diven, who recently switched to the Republican Party, former county Councilman Wayne Fontana, a Democrat, and Libertarian Mark Rauterkus is a priority of both statewide political parties.
More on the overall letter tonight.
Now I'm running out to see Rebecca F of Green Building fame with a presentation at our church, Sunnyhill.org.
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The Race for Mayor: Peduto says he's unfazed by critics and doubters
Sunday, April 24, 2005
By James O'Toole, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"Did you vote to take money from the police pensions?" the retired officer demands.
The Race for Mayor
This is the second of three profiles of the major candidates for the Democratic mayoral nomination May 17. Bob O'Connor's appeared last Sunday and Michael Lamb's will appear next Sunday.
Martha Rial, Post-Gazette
Mayoral candidate Bill Peduto, right, listens to longtime Mount Washington resident Paul Wacker while campaigning yesterday afternoon.
Councilman Bill Peduto can't remember the vote exactly. It had something to do with a health care supplement, he ventures. But yes, he acknowledges, standing on the ex-cop's steps, he believes that is one of the belt-tightening votes he's made on the city of Pittsburgh budget.
"Then I can't vote for you," the Beechview resident barks while ostentatiously tearing a piece of Peduto's campaign literature into confetti.
There are good doors and bad doors for Peduto as he peddles his mayoral candidacy up and down the tidy streets of a community heavily populated by retired police officers and firefighters; good days and bad days for a relatively young politician fighting a two-front war at the end of his first term in public office.
Peduto, 40, is defending his council seat against a challenge from Harlan Stone, an East End lawyer with the endorsement of the Democratic Party organization. More prominently, although not perhaps as prominently as he'd like, he's waging an underdog bid for the Democratic nomination for mayor of Pittsburgh, vying with Prothonotary Michael Lamb to be the chief rival to the better-known, better-funded candidacy of former Councilman Bob O'Connor.
On this terrain, every block has a high side and a low side. Peduto, sporting rimless glasses and a thick shock of dark hair, bounds up the steps two at a time, displaying more energy than his nascent paunch might lead one to expect.
"I gave up hockey for the campaign," he says. "This is my workout."
On this perfect spring day, Peduto gets more polite responses than negative ones, despite recurring quizzes over the pension vote.
"P.J.'s a dead man," he says cheerfully after yet another question at another door. He's referring to P.J. Lavelle, 26, a campaign strategist, who's dispatched him and another aide to this potentially hostile territory for a Saturday afternoon of door-knocking under a perfect spring sky.
Peduto professes not to be fazed at the occasional critics he encounters as he walks up and down the hills of Beechview. It comes with the territory, he maintains, for someone who's going to make the choices demanded by the city's fiscal straits.
Making tough decisions
On this day and throughout his campaign, he portrays himself as the candidate of tough decisions. After a career in various political roles, he characterizes his candidacy as an alternative to the local government establishment, a fresh voice of hope in a town whose civic morale is as battered as its budget.
Opponents, however, noting his relatively brief tenure in office, argue that his candidacy is premature. He's at the end of his first four-year term on council, and critics contend that the Point Breeze resident may have mastered the intellectual concepts of city government but he has yet to demonstrate the ability to assemble broad political coalitions beyond the boundaries of his East End council district.
"I'm the only candidate who has made the difficult decisions to help the city of Pittsburgh," Peduto says on another afternoon as he sits in his crowded council office. "O'Connor never made those decisions when he was on council. He voted for what was politically expedient, and Michael [Lamb] wasn't there. I was the one who called for Act 47 while the mayor said it was too draconian. I know what it's like to have messages on that desk from the wives of ... police officers who just bought a house, who just found out they were going to be laid off."
Shortly after taking office, Peduto called for the city to face its red ink by seeking distressed status under state law, a course finally adopted with the complication of parallel state oversight boards. Peduto points to that recent history as a vindication of his earlier proposal.
A colleague, Councilman Jim Motznik, offers a different analysis. Motznik, who supports O'Connor in the mayor's race and who opposed Peduto on several city budget issues, faults his strategy.
"His statement that he was the first one to say that the city should file for Act 47 is accurate, but I didn't agree with some of my colleagues who were for Act 47 too early," Motznik said. Motznik's view is that the city was forced to give up too much in terms of contract and budget concessions in order to gain the fiscal protection of Act 47.
"If you go to buy a car and the guy says, 'That's $15,000,' and you say, 'Fine,' guess what? You're paying $15,000 for that car. If you're not afraid to bargain, you're going to do better."
Peduto argues that the positions of Motznik and other Act 47 skeptics are at odds with the fiscal realities that hung over the city's spending long before he took office.
His campaign message is not all belt-tightening and eat-your-spinach, however. Peduto calls himself the one candidate who can restore hope to the city, as a leader with big ambitions for the city's future.
At a recent mayoral debate, there was consensus among other candidates that a supermarket would enhance the possibilities of Downtown living.
Peduto scoffed.
"I don't just want a grocery store," he said. "I want a Strip District market Downtown. I want Wholey's and Benkovitz and Pennsylvania Mac."
He doesn't like every big idea. Peduto is a harsh critic of the ambitious and expensive Mon-Fayette highway project.
"People have no idea what a complete snow job that is," he fumed. "People don't understand that it's not going to touch down in those brownfields." Referring to its proposed route into the city through Hazelwood and Oakland, he said, "We're the only urban area in the country that's building a highway along river banks."
Budgeting reforms
Peduto would redirect economic development by merging the city's planning department and the Urban Redevelopment Authority. He said he would reform the overall budget process by instituting a system of "outcome-based budgeting," starting each year's spending plan with a blank slate rather than being constrained by the inertia of previous spending patterns.
In a campaign position paper, he maintained that he would pare $50 million from city spending through initiatives, including reforming budgeting, shifting tax collections to the state, bidding out the city's refuse collections and cracking down on tax deadbeats.
He would spur Downtown development, in part, by offering a program of tax abatements for residential conversions of existing buildings.
Peduto has made a point of cultivating a rapport with the city's arts communities, seeing them as crucial to the city's overall fabric and to its economic development potential in particular. His cultural affinity is reflected in the unique design of his campaign signs and literature, inspired by the style of the noted Pittsburgh artist Burton Morris.
City Councilman Doug Shields worked on Peduto's staff briefly before taking office himself. He worked for a considerably longer period on O'Connor's council staff and is supporting him in the primary. Shields has praise for Peduto's overall record on council and credits him for working with diverse community groups within his district, but he questioned his political outreach beyond those East End neighborhoods.
"He's certainly cultivated a constituency among younger people, progressive people in the arts community," Shields said. "But where's he going with the working-class family, the senior citizens? ... The broader constituency doesn't hear Bill because he's not speaking their language."
Peduto rejects that critique.
"My message to the senior citizen is the same as my message to college students," he said. "Too many feel that this is a dying city. Too many senior citizens think the past was a better time for the city. To both, my message is that we can bring hope back to the city."
He argues that his outreach to groups outside the normal orbit of politics is a strength, not a weakness. Using a homespun metaphor, he said, "I've had a very deliberate process of bringing people who were at the card table up to the main table."
Eric Marchbein, the leader of the 14th Ward in Squirrel Hill, the city's largest, has a harsh view of the councilman, who represents his district. Marchbein formerly supported Lamb and, at least nominally, switched his allegiance to O'Connor after he was endorsed by the Democratic organization.
Noting that none of his council colleagues are supporting Peduto's mayoral bid, Marchbein said, "I don't think he's been effective. He's isolated himself from the other members. He doesn't communicate with parts of the community that aren't enthusiastic about his message."
A significantly different picture of Peduto emerged at a fund-raising pasta party on a recent Sunday at the Schenley Park ice rink. The crowd of about 100 appeared considerably younger than the middle-age-plus average for Pittsburgh Democratic gatherings. Aside from the Peduto signs, the hovering judicial candidates flitting from table to table were among the few visual clues that this was a political function.
In introducing the candidate, Mark DePasquale, himself the son of a former City Council member, Eugene DePasquale, praises Peduto's work with community groups in combatting a neighborhood drug problem.
"Bill Peduto is one of the finest human beings and the most caring public servants I have ever met in my life," DePasquale said.
Nuts and bolts background
Among the supporters listening approvingly is Peduto's mother, Eve, a quiet woman who has to be coaxed to reminisce about her son in the spotlight. Her husband, Bill's father, died seven years ago. She still lives in the Scott home where Bill grew up.
Pittsburgh Penguins player Lowell McDonald lived down the block, reinforcing Peduto's lifetime passion for hockey. He went to Foxcroft Elementary School and Chartiers Valley High School, where he was elected president of student council his senior year.
Eve Peduto dates her son's interest in politics to family gatherings. Bill's grandfather would preside over the table where Bill's father and uncles would linger after meals, talking politics.
"From the time he was in high school, he was interested in running for office," she said, pointing to his student council success.
Rick Chadwick was the campaign manager for that bid. Now the owner of an advertising agency near Boulder, Colo., he's returned to Pittsburgh to handle the media for his old kindergarten classmate's latest election.
The national economy of that time was going through a rough transition, particularly in Pittsburgh, where the steel industry was falling off a cliff. But the era lacked a galvanizing political issue, such as the war in Vietnam, which had consumed students half a generation earlier.
"We were blessed when we came of age," Chadwick said. "The big issue of the campaign was to get more dances. I think we ended up having about a dozen."
From Char Valley, Peduto went on to Carnegie Mellon University, but ended up transferring to Penn State, a campus he left a few courses short of a degree.
In his first taste of professional campaigning, he was field director for now Chief Justice Ralph J. Cappy's 1989 election to the state Supreme Court. A long string of campaign staff jobs followed, most of them with losing candidates. Among them were former Lt. Gov. Mark S. Singel's races for the Senate and for governor in 1992 and 1993, now Auditor General Jack Wagner's loss to Mayor Tom Murphy in the 1993 Democratic primary for mayor and Rep. Allyson Schwartz's bid for the U.S. Senate in 2001.
Peduto was former city Councilman Dan Cohen's campaign manager in a challenge to former U.S. Rep Bill Coyne, an Oakland Democrat, in the 1996 Democratic primary. That losing effort left scattered hard feelings with the perception that Cohen had waged a particularly negative race against the popular veteran. On the eve of the primary, another top Cohen aide, Rich Fitzgerald, who is now president of Allegheny County Council, resigned in protest over the campaign's sharp-elbowed tone.
After Coyne won in a walk, Peduto said he decided that he was more interested in policy than the nuts and bolts of campaigns.
Peduto shifted to Cohen's City Council office, serving as his chief of staff until Cohen decided to return to private life in 2002. With Cohen's support, Peduto won the open seat. In that, he joined the recent parade of council aides who have ascended to council seats. Motznik, Shields, and Twanda Carlisle followed similar paths.
After 1996, Peduto had hoped to shift his focus away from campaign tactics, but now he can't help but be consumed by them. Against the conventional wisdom, he insists that an upset of the front-running O'Connor is well within his grasp. To achieve that, he said, he is concentrating on a strategy relying heavily on the votes of the council district he hopes to win in his concurrent re-election bid.
Based on turnouts in previous mayoral primaries, he expects roughly 67,000 Pittsburgh Democrats to show up at the polls May 17. With this crowded field, he anticipates that 25,000 votes will be enough for a plurality. His chief hunting grounds are the five wards that overlap his council district: the 4th Ward (Oakland), the 7th Ward (Shadyside), the 8th Ward (Bloomfield), the 11th Ward (Highland Park) and the 14th Ward (Squirrel Hill).
Those communities are the chief targets of his effort, quarterbacked from his crowded headquarters at the cusp of the Strip District. There, the results of his team's door-knocking and phone calls are entered into computers nightly, and charted by a geographic information system program. Peduto's Saturday foray into Beechview strayed from his focus communities. But those neighborhoods can't be ignored, because a special election for its state Senate seat contest is expected to spur an unusually high local turnout. That race, between state Rep. Michael Diven, who recently switched to the Republican Party, former county Councilman Wayne Fontana, a Democrat, and Libertarian Mark Rauterkus is a priority of both statewide political parties.
Surrounded by his supporters at the Schenley ice rink, Peduto acknowledges O'Connor lofty poll numbers, but assures the crowd that their goal is within reach.
"We need 25,000 votes; the president of Penn State's student council probably got more than 25,000 votes."
He promises, however, not to wage a negative campaign to get there.
"Bob O'Connor's a nice guy. Michael Lamb's a nice guy," he said. Then, drawing laughs with a passable imitation of O'Connor's regular-guy Pittsburgh accent, he adds, "That Bill Peduto, he's a pretty good guy, too."
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