School board president alleges pay-to-play scheme
In her response to an Allegheny County grand jury report on the Penn Hills School District’s financial collapse, the current school board president disputed claims that she pressured colleagues to hire a politically connected architectural firm that ran up costs and contributed to the district’s downward spiral.
Instead, Erin Vecchio contends that the hiring of Ross-based Architectural Innovations to design two new school buildings was part of a larger pay-to-play scheme involving state Rep. Anthony DeLuca, DPenn Hills, and former Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission chairman Joe Brimmeier, according to her response.
Ms. Vecchio made the claims in her response to a copy of the grand jury report. The report, released Tuesday, said that board members’ and district officials’ poor leadership and mismanagement in building two costly new schools left the district in a “catastrophic financial condition.”
The grand jury’s supervising judge ordered redaction of Ms. Vecchio’s response, removing Mr. Brimmeier’s and Mr. DeLuca’s names from the publicly released version. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette obtained an unredacted copy of that response.
According to the grand jury report, Ms. Vecchio, a former Turnpike Commission employee who left after suffering an injury, received a new state job with the help of Mr. Brimmeier, then head of the commission.
Mr. Brimmeier later called Ms. Vecchio to encourage the board to hire his sister’s firm, Architectural Innovations, to design the new schools, Ms. Vecchio testified to the grand jury. He said that “jobs would be available for the Penn Hills area” if the board hired the firm owned by his sister, Jan, Ms. Vecchio said, according to the report.
“I told him I could get her an interview,” Ms. Vecchio said in her written response. “When Joe said he could make state jobs available for Penn Hills, I told him to call state Rep. Tony DeLuca.”
In her response, Ms. Vecchio claimed that Mr. DeLuca’s family members received state jobs shortly after Mr. Brimmeier’s sister, Jan, was hired to design the new schools in 2008. The legislator’s daughter, son-in-law and secretary’s husband each received jobs at the turnpike; another daughter received a job at the Pennsylvania Lottery; and his cousin received a contract with the school district to supply furniture for the new schools, according to her response.
Ms. Vecchio claimed that the district’s former business manager, Richard Liberto, was “at the center of all this” and that he “was given immunity,” according to her response. About 10 years ago, Mr. Liberto told her and a board colleague that he had cooperated in an FBI probe, she said in her response.
“He said he wore a wire for the FBI to a meeting at Rep. DeLuca’s office, where he, DeLuca and Joe Brimmeier were discussing contracts for the new schools,” Ms. Vecchio said in her response.
According to her response, she claimed that Mr. Liberto received immunity for his cooperation and that he had once claimed to have enough information to “bring them all down, including DeLuca” if prosecutors ever filed charges against him.
“It looks like that strategy worked,” Ms. Vecchio wrote in her response.
When contacted by the Post-Gazette, Mr. Liberto described the allegations in Ms. Vecchio’s response as “absolutely false” and accused her of deflecting amid the grand jury investigation.
“If nobody is getting indicted, then what is the immunity for?” he said. “Somebody has to go to jail for there to be immunity. All Erin Vecchio is doing is pointing the blame at other people for her improprieties and corruption.”
Mr. DeLuca on Tuesday denied the accusations, which he said he had heard from her in the past. He dismissed them as a product of a longstanding political rivalry with Ms. Vecchio, whom he did not support for re-election. And last year, Ms. Vecchio lost to Mr. DeLuca in the Democratic primary for his seat.
“People in Penn Hills, they know me,” he said. “They know that stuff’s not true. If I start defending myself back and forth with her, it will never end. That lady doesn’t care. I have nothing to hide, and certainly my name wasn’t in the report.”
The grand jury report released Tuesday notes that investigators sought material from a previous statewide grand jury investigation to determine if the conduct that Ms. Vecchio described was part of the state probe that resulted in Mr. Brimmeier pleading guilty to a felony conflict of interest in a pay-to-play scandal in 2014. The county grand jury did not receive access to the state grand jury’s information, per the report.