Amid Tough Times, Penny-Pinching Pittsburgh Excels at Cutting Costs : Government: Sensible city pared down its staff and even got rid of the spittoon cleaners at City Hall. However, a $35-million shortfall is projected for 1992.

Through bad times and good times, Pittsburgh has pinched its pennies until Lincoln yelped. And for cities these are bad, bad times.

At least one in four cities faces a huge budget deficit. New York is in its usual crisis; so is Philadelphia. Bridgeport, Conn., has filed for bankruptcy. Beverly Hills has counted its silver spoons and let go some of its staff.

Then there’s sensible Pittsburgh.

Never having lost its head through the intoxicating 1980s, the city remains clear-eyed in the ‘90s. A little luck and several frugal administrations have combined to keep Pittsburgh’s budget pared to the bone.

It wasn’t always so.

When Mayor Pete Flaherty took office in 1970, the City-County Building still had spittoons in the lobby and spittoon cleaners on the payroll. Water-meter readers were chauffeured around town by Teamsters Union drivers. You could call City Hall and get a switchboard operator any time, day or night. Civilian watchmen were posted at police headquarters around the clock, seven days a week.

“They had a chair. They leaned against a wall right in front of the police station,” said Bruce Campbell, who was Flaherty’s executive secretary.

“We decided that since we had policemen going in and out of there, we didn’t really need guards,” he said.

Flaherty eliminated some jobs and withstood a 10-day, Teamsters-led strike.

His successor, Richard Caliguiri, mayor from 1977 through 1988, formed an alliance with business leaders to rejuvenate the city.

“Decisions were made by directors on a business basis, not on what a ward chairman or a powerful local politician wanted,” said George Jacoby, a lawyer who was Caliguiri’s executive secretary. Caliguiri held the line on taxes in all but one of his 10 years in office.

The administration of Mayor Sophie Masloff has continued the miserly methods:

* When the city learned that police officers were gassing up at full-service pumps, it asked them to pump their own fuel. They complied, although the union president complained that the officers would be trailing an odor of gasoline.

City General Services Director Louis DiNardo said the change would save up to 27 cents a gallon, estimated at $37,000 a year.

“Any movement, even if it’s a small movement, saves big money,” he said.

* For two years, Pittsburgh has lighted its fireworks on July 3 instead of on the Fourth, thus eliminating holiday pay for police assigned to the event. Net savings: $20,000.

A side benefit has been that holiday revelers haven’t yet had time to get rowdy. “The quality of the crowd on the third of July is more family oriented than on the Fourth. They don’t drink all day,” city finance director Ben Hayllar said.

* The city decided that Allegheny General Hospital and other tax-exempt institutions should start paying property taxes. Hayllar reasoned that, since the advent of Medicare and Medicaid, many hospitals are being reimbursed for services once rendered as charity.

The hospital, not surprisingly, has challenged the decision; a court hearing is scheduled for later this month.

* The city is sponsoring a raffle for its trash haulers, tree trimmers and dog catchers, intended to reduce workers’ compensation costs by rewarding safety. A $2,000 prize will be split among 10 workers whose names are drawn at random--if none has filed a disability claim that month.

Compensation claims are expected to cost $20 million this fiscal year, or nearly 6% of the city’s $340-million budget, so Hayllar hires private detectives to videotape the activities of recipients suspected of cheating. The city also gives light duties to workers with minor injuries, to avoid what Hayllar calls the Geraldo syndrome (“You want to watch TV; you don’t want to come to work”).

Pittsburgh’s penny-pinching has verged on the ridiculous at times. For example, when a day-care center for the elderly wanted to remove a parking meter to open a no-parking, drop-off space, the battle took 11 months.

“It’s as if parking meters are sort of sacred cows,” said Arlene Snyder, executive director of the Vintage Adult Day Care Center.

She said the city took four months just to supply the name of the person authorized to speak on the matter.

“Once we said there was a meter that had to be removed, there was a gasp,” Snyder said. Finally, she succeeded by calling the mayor’s office.

“We might go for space No. 2. We needed to fall back for a while to recoup strength,” she said.

Hayllar insisted that the city maintains parking meters less for the revenue than for the benefit of merchants who want turnover in the spaces in front of their shops, but Snyder was unconvinced.

“There really aren’t any merchants around our space,” she said.

There have been other instances of profuse parsimony. For instance, it’s been only two years since the city got legible street signs. The few old signs that existed were hard to read. The city caved in and put up new signs only when it became painfully clear that ambulance drivers couldn’t find their way to their destinations.

So, Pittsburgh must be out of the red and in the pink, right? Not exactly.

Last month, department chiefs were ordered to propose layoffs and ways of cutting costs, to avoid a projected $35-million shortfall by the end of 1992.

“We’re experiencing the same type of difficulties, I think, as every city government now,” DiNardo said.

From where they sit, city officials surely believe that, but Alberta Sbragia, an associate professor of political science at the University of Pittsburgh, said the city has avoided some of the severe problems that middle-class exodus has caused in other places.

Nationwide, municipal tax bases have eroded as the inner cities went from merely poverty stricken to blighted and drug-ridden. Social services and police budgets were drained.

“Once a city loses its middle-class residents, it’s almost a downward spiral,” Sbragia said.

Smart city officials, for the past two decades, have averted such flight by keeping taxes low and the public schools sound, she said.

Pittsburgh’s financial health also is partly good fortune.

“We haven’t had a migration of low-income populations, as in other cities,” she said. While other Northern cities were booming with blue-collar jobs in the 1950s and 1960s, Pittsburgh was losing employment. So it never had to absorb the migration of unskilled workers.

“I think Pittsburgh, in the past 20 years, has been viewed as quite well managed fiscally,” Sbragia said.

Then she showed her own Pittsburgh nature: “Some people would say they could be even more careful.”