Charlie and Quinn discuss Pittsburgh’s local government and environment.

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Dear reader,

We try to shape our approach to reporting around very simple, but enlightening questions: What’s happening locally? Why should I care? How might it affect me or my neighbors? How does it relate to other issues, and our history? With those questions in mind, we recently sat down with local government reporter Charlie Wolfson and environment reporter Quinn Glabicki to talk about urgent local issues, where they see overlap between their beats and more. Here are some of their answers.
“What are the most pressing issues on your individual beat right now? What do you wish more people knew about?”

Charlie:
A big topic is the city’s financial recovery from the pandemic. The pandemic in Pittsburgh really devastated their revenue — things like parking revenue and amusement tax, which may not sound like a huge deal but affect the city’s ability to fund the services that we take for granted, like police, fire, EMS. So we’re looking at how and if that’s going to recover — it might not — and how the city might respond so it can continue to function.

Some of the big topics on my beat really overlap with other reporters in our newsroom, which is convenient because we like to collaborate a lot at PublicSource. For example, with Quinn, the county government is really facing a lot of questions about fracking and about emissions from industry, which is obviously an environmental issue and it’s an issue that the government has to tackle. With Eric, our economic reporter, the city is facing what a lot of people have called a crisis of affordable housing and there’s ongoing conversations about how they might solve that. They certainly have not solved it yet, so that’s something we’ll be following going forward.

Quinn:
Pittsburgh’s a really interesting place to talk about environmental issues, particularly because of our industrial legacy and our history of being a heartland of fossil fuel and production of steel. One of the issues that I’m really interested in is energy and labor transitions, and how legacy workers and their families and these communities are going to fit into a future where, by most measurements, those industrial processes and fossil fuels are not being planned into a sustainable future. So there’s a big reckoning in those communities as far as, what do we do now?

On a more zoomed-out scope, the climate issue is everywhere. That's really urgent on pretty much every front. We’re seeing record flooding, record rainfall, and those are just the obvious manifestations of it. Moving forward, those are going to get worse and intensify, and it’s really important that we’re prepared and that we are holding those who prepare us for that future to account, to make sure we have a future where we have safety and prosperity and vitality built into that.
“What’s something you’ve learned that might surprise people who are unfamiliar with your beat?”

Charlie:
I don’t cover daily, breaking news where it’s obvious what’s going to be covered each day. I go looking for stories that aren’t really presenting themselves. That’s what everyone does at PublicSource. All these stories that we’ve uncovered, they were just waiting there for some reporter to find them. And there’s many more where that came from that we’re not going to have time to get to. This could probably be said of every beat, but in local government, there’s so many corners and depths, there’s so many interesting stories, some of them problematic, some of them good stories, some of them just interesting, that are just waiting for somebody to tell that story.

Quinn:
Climate coverage can be despairing or alarming, but there are all these stories about how families and communities are grappling with this shift and also how they’ve endured through time and how they’re trying to persevere. I think that’s something that stuck out to me when I was working in Clairton. ([link removed]) There are stories of people who have been pushing for a better future for so long. As Charlie pointed out, these are stories that are just sitting, waiting for someone to pay attention to them. We’re fortunate to have that opportunity at PublicSource to really dig into them and give them the time and attention they deserve.
Producing journalism that dives deep and considers many sides of important issues takes a lot of time and resources. We’re glad to partner with Report for America ([link removed]) , a national program that covers part of the cost of reporting like this in newsrooms like ours across the country. But we also need the support of our community to help sustain this work. Help us reach our goal of raising $6,000 to support these stories by Sept. 30 — make a gift today. ([link removed])

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