Councilmember Warwick's Response to Post-Gazette Editorial Blaming Residents for Lack of Flood Relief
Kerr County Tragedy Should Be A Call To Action,
Not An Opportunity To Score Political Points
From the age of 7 to 17, I had the joy and privilege of attending a girls’ sleep-away camp for eight weeks every summer. Now, every year, my kids also attend camp for two weeks just outside of Pittsburgh. I cannot put into words my thoughts on the unimaginable suffering of Camp Mystic families and so many others who lost loved ones to flash flooding in Kerr County, Texas.
Recently, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Editorial Board used that tragedy to blame local residents for flooding in their - and my - own neighborhood. I feel compelled to respond.
In 2015, the Post-Gazette reported on a project backed by then-Mayor Peduto to spend millions in City funds on a road through lower Schenley Park. Known as the Mon-Oakland Connector (MOC), the road would allow private autonomous shuttles to drive through the park and through the heart of Greenfield’s Four Mile Run neighborhood (The Run) to connect universities in Oakland with the tech-heavy Hazelwood Green development.
My neighbors were apoplectic. Sewer overflows at the only access point to The Run can create a shoulder-deep lake where our children wait for the bus, submerging vehicles and once trapping a father and son on top of their car. But after decades of failure to allocate resources to the life-threatening floods in our community, there was apparently plenty of money to hand over public park space and construct a bespoke private road for robots in its place.
The City’s and Pittsburgh Water’s solution was to tie flood mitigation and the road together – tacking the MOC onto a permit application to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (PA DEP) for the Four Mile Run Stormwater project. In other words, if The Run wanted flood relief, its residents had to accept the road as well.
For the next six years, neighborhood residents and advocates from across the city fought the MOC while steadily demanding that the flooding problem be fixed. Concurrently, the PA DEP permit application was repeatedly stalled. Throughout that time, Pittsburgh Water insisted that the flood project was not dependent on the road and promised to address flooding in The Run no matter what.
While City Council reallocated some MOC funding in 2020 to pandemic relief and other small projects, the project was still in motion and a priority for the Peduto administration. When Mayor Gainey took office in 2022, he kept his promise to residents of The Run and cancelled the Mon-Oakland Connector - formally announcing the move at a raucous community meeting in Hazelwood. Then-City Councilman Corey O’Connor, whose district included The Run through the peak of our advocacy, was present and also took credit for the project’s cancellation.
In November of the same year, Pittsburgh Water announced changes to the Four Mile Run Stormwater Project, axing green infrastructure components to focus exclusively on underground pipes. At a public meeting in The Run, Pittsburgh Water blamed this setback on complications with utilities infrastructure and a dispute with a railroad. In turn, ALCOSAN also pulled their $10 million contribution, claiming the stormwater management impact projections were not enough to meet their grant requirements. Nonetheless, there was still $25 million allocated to the project in Pittsburgh Water’s budget and residents were assured it was still happening. They just needed to be patient.
Then, in November 2024, without any notice to residents or City Council, Pittsburgh Water’s Board voted to pull the remaining $25 million in funding, putting the Four Mile Run Stormwater Project on an indefinite hold.
Is it any wonder that residents in The Run feel betrayed?
The Post-Gazette’s Editorial Board has accused myself and my neighbors of peddling “conspiracy theories” that our community’s flooding issues would only be fixed if we handed over our streets, public parks, and tax dollars to private developers. But the Editorial Board never actually refutes this idea, instead arguing that if we were serious about preventing flooding in the neighborhood, we should have gratefully welcomed autonomous shuttles and a road through a park to connect moneyed interests.
Residents of The Run know that flood mitigation can be built without transferring public amenities to private developers, and that our health and safety are not bargaining chips for extracting concessions. I’m proud that our community fought back, beat the MOC, and helped to oust a Mayor hell-bent on forcing through this boondoggle. And absent progress toward addressing our flooding crisis, residents of The Run will continue to openly wonder how sour grapes among MOC-aligned power brokers may relate to the sewage-filled stormwater that continues to flood our streets, homes, and businesses.
Using the tragedy in Texas to stoke division and misinformation about a neighborhood’s self-advocacy is a new low for the Post-Gazette, but it does raise a good point. Kerr County leadership missed the chance to install necessary flood protections, with devastating results. The Editorial Board may not understand the importance of protecting our parks and green spaces in combatting disasters like flooding and landslides, but local leaders can and must be better.
It’s time for Pittsburgh Water to keep its promise to The Run, restore the stormwater project funding, and ensure that flooding in our neighborhood is fixed once and for all.
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