Hiding the ball
Gainey must not thwart Heisler’s p-card inquiries
Mayor Ed Gainey’s handling of a burgeoning scandal over the improper use of city credit cards — so-called purchase cards, or p-cards — has only raised further questions about his administration’s conduct. With two dueling investigations into the matter — one from the Controller’s Office, another from the Office of Municipal Investigations (OMI) — it’s essential that both proceed with full cooperation from the mayor’s administration.
In a Friday statement from the Office of the Mayor, however, the administration appeared to withdraw from Controller Rachael Heisler’s inquiry as part of referring the matter to OMI. This raises the suspicion that the administration will seek to control the investigation by keeping it in-house, rather than cooperating with an independent office whose very purpose is to ensure taxpayer resources are not subject to waste, fraud and mismanagement.
This is not acceptable, and represents further erosion of the norms of accountability, transparency and trust — among branches of city government, and between city government and the public — which has become a hallmark of the Gainey administration.
While OMI probes for potential lawbreaking, the Controller should probe for financial irregularities. Both can, should and must be allowed to do their jobs.
A layered scandal
The p-card scandal only came to light because of a remarkable coincidence: The person arrested for antisemitic vandalism at a private home in the Mexican War Streets, Mario Ashkar, had also been an employee of, and then an independent contractor for, the City of Pittsburgh. Were it not for this incident, it is likely the illicit p-card payments would still be occurring — a failure at all levels of government, but especially the Office of Management and Budget and City Council, which prepares and approves the pcard statements, respectively.
There are several layers to this scandal. First, the payments may have violated Pennsylvania’s “revolving door” rules, which forbid payments to ex-public employees representing others or themselves as independent contractors before the same government entity within one year of leaving public employment. Ashkar was hired by the Department of Public Safety in the Special Events office in August 2022, and parted ways with the city by the end of that year. The Department of Parks and Recreation subsequently began paying Ashkar a fee for “farmer’s market coordination efforts” in June of 2023.
Second, the payments certainly violated the city’s policies for pcards, which prohibit using the cards for professional services. Gainey administration officials have readily admitted that the payments broke the rules — there is no way around this — but have attempted to isolate the problem within Parks and Recreation.
This brings up the third, and perhaps most potent aspect of the pcard scandal: How did it happen, and who knew it was happening? Here, by stonewalling Ms. Heisler and approving a likely more limited internal investigation, the Gainey administration has behaved as if it has something to hide.
Dueling inquiries
The p-card scandal is squarely within the competency of the Office of Municipal Investigations, which is a fact-finding operation that “relies on city work rules, union contracts,
civil service regulations, city code, and state laws to define illegal and inappropriate conduct.” The question is: Why did it take so long for Mr. Gainey to call them in?
The antisemitic vandalism occurred on April 19; on April 24, Pittsburgh Police released images of the suspects; and the next day, the police said they had identified one of the suspects, who was Ashkar. OMB director Jake Pawlak has said the city immediately cut ties with Ashkar at that time. This would have alerted administration officials to the p-card payments — which, to make matters worse, were made to a PayPal account that obscured the recipient’s identity — and an inquiry should have begun.
Instead, it took an anonymous tip to the Controller’s Office, followed by Ms. Heisler’s blowing the whistle, to get the ball rolling over three weeks later. And even then, Mr. Gainey only called in OMI several days after Ms. Heisler’s inquiry began, and with about two hours to spare before her deadline to deliver documents to her office, thereby maximally thwarting her efforts.
In fact, during a marathon discussion at City Council on Wednesday that included Ms. Heisler and Mr. Pawlak, the OMB Director promised the Controller that his office was gathering the documents she had requested. That now appears to have been flatly false. Worse: OMI involvement is being used as a shield to deny documents to the Controller’s Office due to an “open investigation.”
While OMI functions with significant independence, the fact that Mr. Gainey is so clearly deploying the office to thwart Ms. Heisler casts doubt on the legitimacy of its work. That’s bad for OMI itself, and for trust in government as a whole.
Open questions
There are still many unanswered questions regarding the pcard scandal, and it will take authentic investigations to sort them out. OMI’s work on rule- and lawbreaking can go on alongside Ms. Heisler’s work on financial impropriety. This is not an either/or situation, and the Gainey administration’s attempt to make it one signals its bad faith.
Why did the first payment to Ashkar from Parks and Recreation occur via invoice — the usual process for a part-time contractor — then shift to p-card? Who authorized this?What “farmer’s market coordination” work was Ashkar doing during the wintertime? What was Ashkar’s actual job description? did Ashkar come to work for Parks and Recreation? Did the department know about Ashkar’s previous employment with the city? Did some higher official direct the department to bring Ashkar on?This episode might’ve been just another blip for a troubled administration, but its caginess has raised further suspicions. And every step Mr. Gainey takes to get in Ms. Heisler’s way, the more suspicious it will be.