Limits on immigration agents, a call for crime data, and a recycling upgrade advance

 This Week’s Top Agenda Items

• Two more bills aim to limit where immigration enforcement can operate in Pittsburgh
• Council pushes for quarterly crime data amid Market Square teen restrictions
• New software will replace the paper binders guiding Pittsburgh’s recycling trucks since 2008

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Two more bills aim to limit where immigration enforcement can operate in Pittsburgh 🔗 🔗

Pittsburgh City Council is moving forward with legislation to freeze out access by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to city property.

The two city code amendments, advanced at the May 6 committee meeting, aim to prevent federal immigration enforcement from using city-owned or -controlled property such as parks and libraries as staging areas as well as entering non-public city property without a judicial warrant. It also cannot use public spaces for questioning, processing or other related activity.

Last month, council passed an amendment to prohibit city employees, departments and agencies from cooperating with enforcement officers. It held the other two amendments to be reviewed by the Law Department.

Council Member Deb Gross of Highland Park, who sponsored all three amendments, said that she also consulted with the Beechview-based Pittsburgh Hispanic Development Corporation. The advocacy group had expressed concerns about the immigrant community’s safety when the three bills were introduced at the end of March. 

If the bills pass, the mayor’s office is responsible for enforcement. The city solicitor will have the exclusive right to bring civil action against anyone who violates them. Consequences could include a $2,000 fine for each violation or termination from city employment.

None of the three amendments prohibit immigration enforcement from taking place in the city, which would violate federal law.

Council is scheduled to hold its final vote on the bills next week.

Council pushes for quarterly crime data amid Market Square teen restrictions 🔗

Council members want more than stories when it comes to restricting teens from public spaces. 

Council voted to move forward with legislation to regularly receive detailed violent crime data, sortable by age and location, at least once per quarter.

The request comes in response to a new policy that prohibits anyone under 18 from being in Market Square from 3 pm until midnight, Thursday to Sunday, unless they are accompanied by someone 21 or older.

Council Member Barb Warwick of Greenfield, who sponsored the bill, said that, aside from two recent high-profile incidents, she could only find anecdotal evidence of teenagers being disruptive, not violent, downtown. She said this does not match the larger public perception.

“We’re talking a lot about violent crime. We’re talking a lot about kids,” Warwick said at the May 6 committee meeting. “Let’s put some numbers behind the feelings, then we can really understand the situation that we’re dealing with.”

Council Member Deb Gross of Highland Park also wants to include gender and residency (inside or outside the city) and to reflect the perpetrators and victims. The city currently maintains a violent crimes dashboard, but it only represents victims in its demographic data and does not include place of residence.

Council is scheduled to hold a post agenda meeting related to the subject on May 20.

New software will replace the paper binders guiding Pittsburgh’s recycling trucks since 2008 🔗

The Department of Public Works (DPW) is ready to recycle the printed routes its drivers have been using for the last eight years.

Christopher Mitchell, project coordinator for environmental services, said during the May 6 committee meeting that the city has been transitioning to a new software program for DPW’s refuse and recycling routes. The routes were last updated in 2008, despite the city having access to route optimization software that it uses for snow removal. Those routes are provided to drivers in paper binders with recycling routes covering more territory than refuse routes.

“A lot has changed in recycling, especially with online shopping, with the amount of cardboard people have, with our blue bins that we have distributed,” Mitchell said. “Pretty much all of our refuse routes get done earlier than our recycling routes.”

He said the software will help create more balanced and easily updatable routes. Currently, the longest recycling route is about 10 hours long.

“That balance is really important,” said Bob Charland of the South Side. “The thing that I complain about all the time is the incentive to get done as fast as humanly possible does not always mean that everything, especially on the recycling routes, gets in the back of the truck.”

Mitchell said there was confusion about the existing $274,150 route-optimization contract with the software company SmartRoute. It does not include the in-vehicle turn-by-turn navigation systems DPW started to introduce recently, which requires a separate $113,280 contract that will run through Nov. 30, 2027.

Council agreed to move forward with the requested software.