Past deadline and under scrutiny, Allegheny County casts for consultants to draft  climate plan

Alisa Grishman was 19 when she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Now 42, she’s among the roughly four out of five people living with MS who experience dramatically worse symptoms when they get hot — from blurred vision to numbness and tremors.

The heat dome which descended over the Northeast last month rendered her all but housebound.

“As I get hot, I turn into a wet noodle. I lose all ability to function,” said Grishman, a wheelchair user and founder of the disability advocacy group, Access Mob Pittsburgh.

As Allegheny County drafts its first Climate Action Plan [CAP] — a roadmap to “avoid dangerous climate change” — Grishman is one of the advocates seeking to have their perspectives  included. During a council meeting earlier this month, County Executive Sara Innamorato said any plan would be predicated on “community engagement and small ‘d’ democracy.” But advocates like Grishman worry that the county risks greenwashing its climate ambitions if it contracts a consultancy company that fails to earnestly engage with the most vulnerable locals.

The county began soliciting consulting firms to help draft a CAP on June 6, more than nine months after the council first asked for one. Interested companies were given 20 days to apply, and only if they attended a mandatory meeting a week after the application window was opened. The window closed five days before the council’s self-imposed deadline for a full draft CAP and the council passed a year-long extension to this deadline the following day.

People with disabilities, indigenous and minority ethnic groups, poor people, people who work outdoors and displaced populations are all more vulnerable to climate change . Some are more exposed to changing weather patterns, others have less resources to adapt to changes. Some live with a combination of both.

One summer Grishman was taken into emergency care after she passed out from heat exposure. Now, every time the thermometer inches up, familiar patterns of worry return. “A lot of my energy goes into checking the weather. Will I be able to go out? How long can I stay out?”

Sometimes she’ll “just go out to doctors’ appointments and nothing else,” she said. “I become a prisoner in my own house.”

What’s at stake?

Local government and state CAPs typically seek to limit future climate-related harms by cutting greenhouse gas emissions from state-owned vehicles and properties. The City of Pittsburgh authorized its own action plan in 2008 and has since updated it twice. The most recent version , adopted in 2017, listed a number of goals for 2030: from halving emissions and doubling carbon sequestration, to diverting all the waste it currently sends to landfills.

Climate plans can also seek to address climate inequities. In Erie County, New York, for example, officials augmented their 2019 climate plan last year with a community plan . The new plan mapped vulnerable communities and, among other measures, mandated more than a third of the county’s clean energy investments go to those areas.

For those like Grishman, who already live with the impacts of climate change, little things make a big difference — and sometimes harm vulnerable people in unexpected ways. She noted that a recent city change in recycling collection had unintended consequences for wheelchair users.

Hurry up and wait

Locally, advocates worry the kinds of sustainability decisions which affect them most could be taken without their voices heard, if the county does not choose a consultant with a history of genuine community engagement. They pointed to a drafting process they say is at best disorganized and at worst artificially rushed. Innamorato’s spokesperson, Abigail Gardner, said in a written statement that the process was typically rigorous, though slowed “out of deference” to a new incoming executive “to put her own stamp on it.”

Councilmember Anita Prizio first sponsored an ordinance for the county to draft a CAP in May 2023. The timeline since then:

• Sept. 1: Former County Executive Rich Fitzgerald signed the ordinance , which included a July 1 deadline for presenting the executive and council with a draft.
• June 6: With less than a month until the deadline for a draft, the county posted a request for qualifications for “Climate Action Planning Support Services.” The request set a deadline of less than three weeks and mandated interested bidders attend a meeting the following week. At least 41 representatives from 25 consulting firms RSVPed to that meeting on June 13, according to council’s public Google calendar.
• June 26: 10 companies submitted applications by the deadline, according to Brittany Prischak, director of the county’s sustainability department. The county declined to say which companies applied.
• July 2: A day after the county missed the initial deadline, council passed a motion to extend the deadline for a draft by one year. Councilors Samuel DeMarco III and Robert J. Macey voted against the motion. Neither responded to a request for comment.

During an interview the day the extension was passed, Prizio said that she knew the initial deadline would be tight when she first proposed the ordinance. “At that point we didn’t have a director of sustainability yet … so it was probably too optimistic to assume that we would have something in place by July 1, 2024,” said Prizio, adding that “nothing really happened with it” after the ordinance was first signed.

For Helen Gerhardt, an environmental and social justice advocate who assembled Grishman and other representatives from climate-vulnerable communities, the deadline extension was welcome and necessary to draft a meaningful plan. But if officials knew an extension would be necessary, Gerhardt questioned the need to close consultancy applications so soon before the July 1 deadline.

“Why the rush?” she said. With less than three weeks, Gerhardt worries smaller, local consulting firms with a more genuine interest in community engagement may have been excluded from an “outrageously rushed” process, while larger companies had the resources to respond quickly enough.

Prizio said the July 1 deadline, despite being unattainable, kept the issue front of mind for the council. “It was important that we start the process and put some kind of date there.” She said a draft CAP will “hopefully” be finished by next July, the new deadline.

Prischak said that’s unlikely. “If we’re anticipating a full 12 months for the planning process, and we still have to get through contracting and scoping, then 12 months exactly will probably be difficult,” she said.

Gardner, Innamorato’s spokesperson, said the county gave a typical amount of time for firms to respond. “A procurement process that enforces standards for qualifications is not nefarious, it protects public money from waste, fraud, and abuse including favoritism,” she wrote in a statement, adding that other official business (such as hiring a new warden, or updating the comprehensive plan for county resources) were also delayed by the handover to Innamorato. Brittany Prischak, head of the county sustainability department, also said that 10 responses is higher than usual for similar contracts.

According to other local consultants not involved in this contract, 20 days is an unusually short application window. Richard Garlitz is Pittsburgh Branch Manager for BBJ Group, a state environmental engineering consulting firm which has previously drafted local and state environmental safety policies and overseen industrial cleanups. In 25 years working as an environmental engineer, Garlitz said application windows for the shortest local contracts typically stay open for at least 30 days, and some can extend for months.

“Maybe they have a deadline, I don’t know,” he said. “But it does seem tight.” He added it was unusual to have both a short application window and a mandatory pre-application meeting, which are typically called for “more complex” contracts.

Big firms, small hopes?

Some of the firms which registered for the county’s meeting do not specialize in environmental work, like “Big Four” accounting advisors Deloitte. Others, such as HDR, AECOM, CDM Smith and Tetra Tech, represent international engineering firms. Mott MacDonald, whose Vice President Kemal Niksic attended the meeting, was recently awarded a contract developing a 40-year-old oil field in Saudi Arabia with Kuwait’s state oil company and Aramco, the world’s largest corporate polluter .

Gerhardt said she worries some of these firms are not genuinely interested in community engagement, but “checkbox” sustainability measures to bolster their image and reputation. Before a vote was held to extend the deadline, Innamorato told councilors in her quarterly address that whichever firm is selected, the action plan drafting process will continue with an external advisory group comprising “representatives of the environmental justice communities and members of frontline communities.”

After listing techniques to fight heat exposure (from vests, caps and bra inserts filled with ice packs to cooling misters) the National MS Society’s guide concludes with a suggestion of “considering a move to a ‘better’ climate.” Grishman said she’s thought about leaving Allegheny County if the heat gets much worse, but she cannot  afford to move. Ultimately, she does not know where she would go, if she could. “I don’t think there really is anywhere.”

Daniel Shailer is a climate and environmental reporter and can be reached at danshailer@btinternet.com and on Twitter .

This story was fact-checked by Jess Daninhirsch .

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