City, water authority looking for fixes
Pittsburgh’s mayor and its public water authority on Friday will take what they hope is a step or two toward solving operations and funding issues facing the authority, and lead contamination problems affecting some city water customers.
At 10 a.m., Mayor Bill Peduto will attend a public meeting of his nine-member “blue-ribbon” panel, which will interview four teams of experts that have applied to serve as advisers to the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority on legal, operational and financial matters.
The four finalists were selected by the panel from 18 teams that responded to the city’s request for proposals.
Each of the four finalist teams contains legal, financial and community members. One will be selected to manage a possible restructuring or “revamping” of the PWSA, according to Mr. Peduto, who declined to name the four finalists Thursday.
“Each of those finalists will make their pitch,” Mr. Peduto said. “What they're pitching now is what a redevelopment or a restructuring would look like. What they're pitching is the ability to be the financial experts, the legal experts, the engineering experts in order to be able
to provide the board with the best options going forward.
“At that point, then, there will be another full public process in finding what that strategic partnership would look like."
Kevin Acklin, the mayor’s chief of staff, will lead the meeting and said the panel will recommend one of the four teams to the mayor, who will then submit that recommendation to City Council for its approval.
He said the PWSA board would eventually be asked to share in the cost for the advisory team that is selected. He said the cost of hiring the advisory team and the length of its contract hasn’t been determined but would be based on the scope of the consulting work proposed by the team selected.
“We’re at the point where that tin can can’t be kicked down the road any longer without flying up and hitting us in the forehead,” Mr. Acklin said. “We need to own this. And we will solve this problem.”
Friday’s meeting will be held in City Council chambers at the CityCounty Building and is open to the public.
Three hours after the start of that meeting, the PWSA, which postponed its regular monthly meeting last Friday after three board members, including its chairman, resigned, is scheduled to meet at its Strip District offices on Penn Avenue.
Only four members remain on the PWSA board, the bare minimum for a quorum, and the mayor, who appoints the board, has said that he wants to name replacement board members by the end of the week, but they would need to be confirmed by City Council, so the new members will not take their seats before that.
Neither the mayor, Mr. Acklin nor Will Pickering, a PWSA spokesman, would say who the mayor will appoint.
Mr. Acklin said the appointments could be announced Friday or Monday.
The PWSA has been buffeted by a storm of problems, missteps, frustrations, errors and bad luck, including a revolving door of executive directors, meter problems, billing inaccuracies, water main failures, a boil water advisory, board resignations, and an illegal switch in water treatment chemicals that has contributed to rising lead levels in homes with lead service lines.
The PWSA board also hired in July 2012, Veolia North America-Northeast LLC, a private water management company to oversee operation of the water system, but fired the firm in December 2015.
A draft performance audit of the PWSA by the city controller released in February blamed Veolia for several of the authority’s problems involving incompatible meters, billing problems and the water treatment chemical change.
Veolia on Thursday sent a five page letter to City Controller Michael Lamb challenging those findings.
In an email accompanying the letter, Veolia’s press office stated, “In the audit report, he was sharply critical of Veolia, basing many of the conclusions on a number of erroneous PWSA statements that are part of an ongoing attempt by PWSA to shift blame from themselves and avoid responsibility for recent mismanagement and corrosion problems.”