Reform Pittsburgh Now

This evening, in the rooms where his mayoral campaign once hummed along and then shut itself down, Bill Peduto began an interesting political experiment. Using the network he has leftover from that campaign he's looking to kick start another local political movement - Reform Pittsburgh Now!

Clad casually (see picture), he began the meeting with a brief summary of the reasons he unplugged his run for the Mayor's office. He said he would have lost, and lost big. The loss would have damaged any chance of further reform in this city. The only way to level the playing field against Luke Ravenstahl's huge poll numbers was to go negative - big time. But going negative would inevitably have alienated his supporters and so on.

Peduto reiterated just how big Ravenstahl's poll numbers were with a joke (now safe to tell, he said, as it's no longer Holy Week). Peduto said that if Jesus himself were running in this campaign not only would Luke still win big, but he'd get the carpenter's union endorsement to boot.

Forgive me but it took me a few minutes to get the carpenter's union joke.

He went on to say that there's an odd mindset in the city. People are tired of business as usual, HOWEVER they see the solution to business as usual as Luke Ravenstahl.

So what was the meeting for? He's looking to have Pittsburgh's progressive community have a greater hand in setting the agenda for reforming city politics. The crowd of about 75 was faced with 10 or so desks, each with a sheet of paper taped to it. Handwritten on each sheet of paper was a policy issue - Economic Development, Education, Art/Technology and so on.

Everyone was then invited to head over to the policy group with which they were most comfortable and start brainstorming. The plan was to have a set of reform policies in place by the end of the month of May. At that point, Peduto would then begin to present them, one by one, to City Council. Within a few minutes each table had some sort of crowd around it, though of the ten or so tables there, most of the buzz seemed to be happening around the Economic Development, Transit, and Public Safety tables.

I guess that's what's on people's minds.

Peduto said while he was happy with the showing tonight, he's looking to expand the group to possibly 600 by the end of the year. It'll be made up of people interested in policy, but not necessarily politics.

When I asked him HIS place in the group, he said he's the voice. When the agenda is set, his seat at City Council will be the access point for the reform group into city politics. The existence of the group, he said "is to show other elected officials that it's safe to jump into water."

Earlier in the evening, when commenting on why it's important to have such an organization pushing a reform agenda, he said, "If we don't do it, no one's going to."