Free Republic

PITTSBURGH — Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto wants the city council to approve a $2.5 million universal basic income program. According to our partners at TribLive.com, the money would come from federal COVID-19 pandemic relief funding. Peduto said the program would provide monthly cash payments to Black women. It’s not clear if it is exclusionary or not as the full details of the pilot program have not yet been released. The program is already being tested in other cities around the country where people get monthly cash payments. According to NPR, randomly selected people living at or below Stockton, California’s average...

Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto conceded defeat to state Rep. Ed Gainey in a four-way Democratic primary race for mayor, positioning Gainey to become the first Black mayor in the city’s history.With 393 of the city’s 402 voting precincts reporting results around 1:15 a.m., Gainey had received about 46.2% of the votes counted, while Peduto collected 39.3%, retired Pittsburgh police officer Tony Moreno had 13.1% and math tutor and ride-hailing-service driver Michael Thompson had 1.2%, the tallies showed.Peduto had taken to Twitter about an hour earlier to congratulate Gainey.“I just called (Gainey) and congratulated him on earning the Democratic endorsement for...

Dressed in black and carrying signs like “Defund the Police, Peduto is a coward,” about 150 protesters marched to Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto’s home Sunday after rallying in Mellon Park in Point Breeze. Protesters were outraged by a “low-visibility arrest” of a protester in Oakland on Saturday during a Black Lives Matter protest. The arrest of 24-year-old Matthew Cartier came several hours into the protest in Oakland. Social media video shows police officers, not in uniform, emerge from an unmarked van and pull Cartier inside. Pittsburgh police Cmdr. Ed Trapp said that Cartier was blocking an intersection unnecessarily, stepping in...

Mayor Bill Peduto is pushing back against Pittsburgh Cultural Trust concerns about a “declining level of public safety” Downtown, vowing that he won’t criminalize homelessness or mental health issues. In a scathing rebuttal to a July 10 letter written by Cultural Trust CEO Kevin McMahon, Mr. Peduto said the city is working with Allegheny County and nonprofit agencies to address issues like homelessness Downtown and to get people into housing. “But it doesn’t happen at the snap of a finger and we’re not going to attack this national epidemic by criminalizing the status of those that have the least,” he...

PITTSBURGH - Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto said he would welcome any detained migrants sent to the city by the Trump administration. His comments came days after the president said he wants to bus undocumented immigrants to so-called sanctuary cities. While Pittsburgh is not a sanctuary city, the mayor said all are welcome here. "It's sort of forgotten, that idea of America was a country that would welcome all, especially those that are facing persecution or whose countries are facing poverty," he said.

WASHINGTON — Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto said Sunday that he disagrees with President Donald Trump's call for more armed guards at places of worship in order to prevent shootings like the one that claimed the lives of 11 congregants at a synagogue in the city on Saturday. Instead, Peduto told NBC's "Meet the Press," he believes that gun control measures would go further to help stop these shootings. "I belong to an organization, a bipartisan organization, called Mayors Against Illegal Guns. I don't think that the answer to this problem is solved by having our synagogues, mosques and churches filled...

Pedal Pusher: Peduto sets Pittsburgh on down cycle by Daniel Clark “It isn’t the way it was in 1970,” says Pittsburgh mayor Bill Peduto. “Not everyone’s dream is to have their own car and use it to get to work.” Actually, you’d have to go back a lot farther than 45 years to find a time that having a car was “everyone’s dream.” The Model T had made that a reality half a century earlier. By 1970, it was just a normal facet of life in a civilized Western nation. Well, we can’t have that, now, can we? Peduto vowed...

Pittsburgh’s mayor-elect Bill Peduto traveled to Washington D.C. last week and Channel 11 News has learned he had an interesting request for the president. Peduto was one of 16 newly-elected mayors to meet with President Barack Obama on Friday. The president discussed city challenges and job creation with the group. But Peduto said he also asked the president for the scaffolding around the Washington monument. “The president asked, ‘why would you want it?’ I think he thought I was going to scrap it and make some money. I said, ‘no, what I would like to do is make it so...