It hasn’t gotten anywhere near the attention of the race for Allegheny County executive, and many observers see the outcome as a foregone conclusion. But the race for Allegheny County controller hasn’t been drama free, with a familiar incumbent seeking a full four-year term against an upstart challenger.
Corey O’Connor, a former Pittsburgh city councilor whose late father was mayor, was appointed to the controller’s office last summer after Chelsa Wagner left it to serve as a Common Pleas Court Judge. He’s running for a full four-year term but says the past several months have been a dress rehearsal for what he could accomplish.
“We got sworn in on Sunday," O'Connor said. "We were there Monday at 8 a.m. … [But] we have a proven track record already of going after organizations, but also solving problems.”
O’Connor touts his efforts to hold the county government and its agencies accountable, including a recent audit of Visit Pittsburgh. The audit raised concerns about how well the tourism agency was spending and tracking taxpayer dollars. O'Connor also made a push to limit political activity by financial firms that do business with the county’s pension boards.
The controller also holds a seat on the county’s Jail Oversight Board, a long-ignored oversight agency that has become the site of increasingly contentious debates about the treatment of those inside the county lock-up. O’Connor has completed one audit calling for more proactive efforts to support the families of those who are incarcerated. He's working on another about jail staffing.
That’s as many audits in seven months as have been carried out at the jail in seven years, O’Connor said.
“I have the experience, I have the knowledge, and I think that’s what you want in this role — not just somebody that’s going to pick out a problem, but actually come up with solutions,” O’Connor said.
But his challenger, Darwin Leuba, has his doubts. O’Connor, he said, is simply glomming onto issues that progressive advocates, like himself, have long pressed.
“I’ve started the groundwork for a lot of what needs to happen in the controller’s office,” he said. “Corey hasn’t done the work on these issues that he says he now supports.”
Although Leuba is lesser-known, he has arguably been involved with county government longer than O’Connor, albeit as an activist and sometimes gadfly. Leuba worked on campaigns to elect county councilors Anita Prizio and Bethany Hallam, two of council’s most liberal members, and he has spoken up at Jail Oversight Board meetings.
Along with demanding rigorous policing of polluters and jail reforms, Leuba calls for more aggressive challenges of tax exemptions enjoyed by UPMC and other large non-profits. The work, he said, “can’t go any further without the statutory authority of that office,” and he pledged to pursue it with more urgency than O’Connor.
Leuba frequently introduces himself as the auditor for O’Hara Township, and while he acknowledges that it is “a nominal position,” it might be closer to the truth to say it exists in name only. The community voted more than 30 years ago to have an outside firm handle the auditing of municipal finances.
Leuba acknowledges that being an auditor “means very little directly in terms of what you’re required to do.” But he said that when he seeks information from other offices, the title “gives me the opportunity to say I’m not just some random requester. I’m somebody who cares enough to put myself on the ballot and do this work.”
Any citizen can file a right-to-know request. However, few have done so as zealously as Leuba, who has used them to seek details about the region’s failed effort to secure an Amazon headquarters and to unearth policies — or the lack of them — at the Allegheny County Jail. Leuba’s requests have previously put him at odds with the controller’s office. State officials sided with him in those disputes, though they rejected his request to find the office acted in bad faith, and the argument largely turned on how quickly it responded to his information request.
“If this is what I’ve done without the resources of an office just imagine how much more is possible," Leuba said.
However, securing the office might not be easy. Leuba’s website proudly boasts that the campaign does not accept money from corporate political committees “because your Controller shouldn’t take corporate money.” But it’s not clear the issue would have arisen for his campaign even without such a policy: Leuba himself is far and away the biggest contributor to his campaign’s $18,624.74 effort.
By contrast, O’Connor raised $162,628.51 this year, which when added to his existing war chest gave him a quarter of a million dollars to spend. He’s also snapped up endorsements from a broad array of unions and local officials. Leuba has secured support from some decidedly left-leaning environmental and political groups.
O’Connor scoffed at the idea that he might be beholden to any of those donors. “I will call out anybody when the time is right,” he said. He cited his proposal to pare down politics at the county’s pension board, where the controller sits, as an example of his willingness to sacrifice a political contribution for what’s right.
Leuba countered voters would have to trust that O’Connor would follow through once the pressure of the campaign was over. “And I don’t think we should take anybody at their word.”
