Interview: Carmen Robinson

"It's a fear tactic used to campaign," is how attorney and retired police sergeant Carmen Robinson describes her rival's demand for an audit of a past Water Authority bond deal.

"It's just what Obama accused George Bush of."

"Obviously, it was a sweetheart deal", Robinson readily agrees. She just thinks Mayor Ravenstahl is hardly the only person to blame for it. "[Councilman Dowd] should have been a little more responsible."

"I just would think myself and Dowd would be a little different; we're both very progressive-minded, and out to fight for the City of Pittsburgh."

I warned her: that sounded dangerously close to an endorsement.

"Looking at his views, coming into the race," she Robinson reflected, "I thought he would have been more people-oriented. And maybe he is -- but fear tactics isn't the way to do it."

Yet at the same time, instead of focusing narrowly on one transaction, Robinson would address the larger concern in a different manner.

"Let's have an investigation into whether the City really is for sale."

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Robinson says she decided to run for mayor way back in April of 2008, prompted by what she calls Luke Ravenstahl's "lack of vision".

She was troubled specifically at that time by what she was hearing about negotiations with Hill District and Uptown residents regarding the new Penguins arena.

"I was really extremely angry -- I should say, passionate," she clarified quickly and a little coyly, "about the amount of assistance the Penguins were getting from the city."

"Mayor Ravenstahl was rejecting every attempt to respond" to entreaties from the surrounding neighborhood, is how she remembers it. "He didn't seem to really care."

"He wasn't taking them seriously. He so quickly and easily rejected their gripes and concerns. So I started following him."

"I wasn't stalking him," she added with a smile -- but she did begin attending more and more community gatherings featuring our mayor. That's when "the light came on", as she describes it: Luke Ravenstahl, she asserted plainly, didn't seem to care about poor people.

"Especially when you can tell they're really poor," she adds. "He just sort of nonchalantly dismissed their concerns. It was odd."

We asked then what is her own vision for restoring prosperity and a measure of justice to the Hill District.

"I have to tell you," she answered frankly. "Looking at it as an officer, the most important neighborhood to me is the one most in need. To me, running neck and neck, it's Homewood and Lincoln-Larimer."

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"I think it's ridiculous when pundits say, 'Pittsburgh fared well during the recession'," Robinson said, in a haughty imitation of a television academic.

She describes a town that is "bipolar" -- relative affluence and safety in some areas, desperate poverty and high crime in others, and a shrinking middle class throughout. She is not impressed by Ravenstahl's boasting of crime at "40-year historic lows".

"He's right, but it's absurd to capitalize on," says Robinson. "If you have a low crime rate and a high homicide rate -- which one are you concerned about?"

Robinson is anxious to treat crime as "a public-health issue" and get to "root causes".

"Invest in our middle class. Give a little help to our neighborhoods that need it," she outlines. "Are we going to have a variation of rent control, for neighborhoods that are being improved? Are we going to have commercial tax abatement" for smaller business districts in struggling communities, she asks.

The "core cause" of despair in these neighborhoods, she argues, is a "lack of hope".

"Gun control is just a distraction. Of course we'd like to get guns out of the hands of criminals, but guess what -- they're criminals".

As for drug decriminalization, "I've heard that from as early as I've been in the academy. You can legalize everything, it won't do any good. It's about hopelessness."

And don't even get her started on security cameras.

"$4.3 million on surveillance equipment -- which is supposed to deter crime. As a police officer, I'm scratching my head." The technology may help prosecute some crime, she says, but it's not going to deter anything.

Robinson half-seriously suggests it would have be better to spend far less money on huge, antiquated cameras that are clearly visible to all around -- at least that will be noticed by criminals.

"And what's with this out-of-state company getting the money?" she asks. "And who's going to man these cameras?"

Robinson would rather the resources remain in Pittsburgh. "You want to talk about a deterrent. Beat cops are a great deterrent", she says.

And it doesn't help that our officers are both outnumbered and outgunned. "Right now we have M-16s versus AK-47s."

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Yet Robinson is just as passionate about her "public health" approach to both crime and poverty, pledging to dedicate further resources to re-open shuttered community centers and improve our "failing" schools. Since tending to these root causes is expensive -- even more expensive than security cameras -- I had to ask where else the money is going to come from.

She had two suggestions close at hand.

One lies in redirecting state and federal grant money, which flows through the Urban Redevelopment Authority and other agencies, to make sure it benefits needy communities and smaller developers. She calls for "dramatic" changes in how the URA apportions resources.

"The problem is not, 'The U.R.A'," she says using scare-quotes, "It's their vision. It should be on the middle class. Right now the URA is focused on things like Bakery Square -- gentrification."

"We're knocking down housing 'projects' and putting up single-family homes," she complains, and in turn those people flee to areas like Braddock and Duquesne. "Do we really have low-income housing in Pittsburgh?"

Another source of untapped revenue for Robinson's economic program would be the quote-unquote "non-profit" sector.

"We have more universities and more hospitals that are so-called 'nonprofits' -- it's absolutely ridiculous. Let's take one building -- let's make it the Cathedral of Learning."

Hypothetically, she says, by taxing the value of that one property, we would generate ten or twenty times as much as we currently garner via the entirely voluntary Pittsburgh Public Service Fund.

"When someone brings me a deal like that," she says of the most recent proposal for payments-in-lieu-of-taxes, "I'm like 'Hmm, what are you trying to sell me?'"

"Did the Mayor try to negotiate back?" she asked, incredulously. "My initial reaction is to say, 'They low balled me.' I'd ask for triple."

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"Then I see some absurd amount of money spent on something ridiculous", like video cameras or worse, she sighs. It all comes down to realigning the city's priorities with its needs.

"Listen, we don't need money for this, we need money for that."

And that is usually defined as encouraging the growth of a middle class where she sees one shrinking and suffering.

"If I lose, I'd like the person who does win to have vision," she explains. "And if I'm running against two guys with no vision -- that's a problem for the City of Pittsburgh."