LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON

Mel and John Weinstein’s long ascent to the crest of local power

BY JAMIE WIGGAN AND ELIZABETH PERRY // JAMIE@PGHCITYPAPER.COM

IT’S A BIG YEAR for father and son politicos Mel and John Weinstein the elder is coming up on his 50th year in power, and the younger is running for the top spot in county politics. John was 9 years old when his father first ran for Kennedy Township commissioner in 1973. The thrill of campaigning seized the youngest Weinstein child, who shadowed his dad around the trail, stuffing envelopes and greeting voters.

“From that point on, [John] was right at my side,” Mel recalls. “He was like my tail.”

Mel finished that race on top and knocked out an incumbent to secure a seat on the township’s five member board, where he served for several decades before switching roles to treasurer and tax collector.

After arriving in office, the former steel executive says he was quickly disillusioned by his colleagues’ lack of business know-how. He instituted management reforms, and as each election cycle rolled around, he challenged his former running mates with hand picks he felt were better suited to the task of local government.

Weinstein rose up quickly, earning the board president’s gavel within two years, but he continued feuding with rivals for about a decade until his faction won out.

“I knew I was making some enemies,” he says of the period. “From that time on it was Mel Weinstein and company.”

Fifty years later, John, his former shadow, is the current Allegheny County treasurer and the frontrunner in a heated contest to succeed outgoing Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald. Mel remains the top powerbroker in the West Hills suburb of about 9,000 where both live in neighboring homes on a quiet cul-de-sac.

At 84, Mel, tall and wiry, still embodies much of the youthful “athlete” he describes in his 1956 high school yearbook. He speaks slowly and hoarsely, but with an understated force that doesn’t alter when he’s agitated or angry.

John, meanwhile, is shorter and less angular. He talks with energy and alacrity, and his polished phrasing suggests years of public relations training.

John says he wouldn’t be where he is without the example of his father — his “best friend,” as well as a crucial mentor and sounding board.

“I spend a lot of time talking with him, and talking about ideas and initiatives and things like that,” John says. “And I’ve learned so much from him over the past 50 years that he’s been in office.”

For father and son alike, the ascent through local politics has garnered loyal supporters as well as some fierce enemies. John set out his bid for

Allegheny County executive during a packed launch party early January where a swarm of strategists, labor leaders, and wealthy donors parted with a suggested $1,000 cover fee to gain admittance. By then, he already commanded a formidable campaign chest from years of fundraising, and in the following months, he consolidated his frontrunner status as endorsements trickled in from powerful unions and party committees.

But since picking up the county’s Democratic Party endorsement in March, his campaign has taken a battering from local media.

Among the more pointed accusations, reporting in early March claimed John was removed from the board of environmental organization ALCOSAN amid an FBI investigation, and subsequently sought to strike a “secret deal” with an allied politician to regain his position there.

During the same week, he was also identified in a corruption lawsuit for supporting the campaign of a judge who now employs his stepson and another close associate. Subsequent reports have since surfaced criticizing his campaign spending and other aspects of his 24 years in public office.

John was quick to denounce these accounts in a statement, where he labeled them together as “rumors, outright falsehoods, and innuendos slung by competitors.” During an interview for this story, he suggested the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which broke the reports on ALCOSAN and the alleged deal-making, was retaliating for his union support while the paper is embroiled in a six-month labor strike.

The Post-Gazette has qualified its reporting with the acknowledgement that, “Mr. Weinstein has not been charged with any wrongdoing or publicly identified as the subject of any investigation.”

Mel, no stranger to critical media coverage, says he primed his son for some kind of backlash but was unprepared for the protracted scrutiny.

“When he started, I said ‘John, you need to run a positive campaign … now beware because you’re going to have people out there who look for dirt,’” he says. “I never thought that they would reach as low as they have — and they have reached low.”

Mel is spry and alert for his 84 years. He awakens each morning at 5:30 a.m. and says a prayer before setting to township business. Every day brings upward of 80 emails and 20 voicemails, he says.

Fueling this work ethic is, in Mel’s words, an abiding love for the community he’s called home for nearly six decades.

“Why would Mel Weinstein want to serve 50 years in a community he loves so much?” he asks of himself. “It’s in those words, ‘a community he loves so much.’”

As elected tax collector and appointed treasurer, Mel wields less formal power than Manager Greg Clarke, but his influence looms over all township affairs — not least in the naming of the Mel Weinstein Municipal Center, the township’s formal place of business.

He opens each monthly board meeting with a prayerful invocation, and during the business portions that follow, commissioners gush with praise about Mel’s leadership and achievements. Dissension is rarely seen among the five members.

With a political structure built around one man without an obvious successor, Mel says the fate of the community beyond his watch “keeps me up at night.”

“My greatest fear is leaving,” he says. “And someday I’m going to have to.”

Not everyone appreciates his level of influence, though.

Starting in the late 1990s, a group of residents formed the Kennedy Township Committee for Community Awareness. What started as an organization to stop a housing development from being built in Kennedy later shifted to a focus on bringing transparency to local government.

During the height of their movement, two former members, Colleen McMillan and Margie Parent, raised voter fraud allegations over discrepancies in the 1997 election. The Allegheny County Board of Elections investigated the claims and presented evidence of voter fraud to the district attorney that allegedly implicated Mel and John, but charges were never brought.

Margie’s son, Kevin Parent, once a member of the committee, says at the time he was frustrated by the lack of dissension, and the lock-step consensus among the board.

“Nothing changes. You’ll get new faces on the board, [but] have you ever heard an argument?” Kevin Parent asks.

Mel counters that the loyalty shown by commissioners reflects his astute leadership.

“Everybody I brought in agreed with me,” he says.

When, two decades ago, she was active in local Kennedy politics, McMillan would get regular emails complaining about Mel’s dominance, she says.

“They wanted you to fight their battles. When I said ‘why don’t you just go to the meetings yourself,’ they’d say, ‘I might need Mel for something,’” McMillan says. “Because you’re fearful, you’re giving him the power. Because you’re not willing to stand up, you’re giving him more power.”

Mel says the critics come with the territory.

“You’re always going to have the naysayers,” he says. “They killed Jesus, come on.”

John disputes any suggestion that his father is feared among the community, saying instead his power stems from generosity and public service.

Characteristic of this neighborly devotion, Mel says he attended 59 funerals last year. The year before, he went to 78.

“Because I touch so many people’s lives,” he says. “And John is the same way.” votes in return.

Campaign records show funeral flowers and related items are a regular expense of the Kennedy Township Democratic Committee campaign fund that Mel chairs. This, according to ethics experts, isn’t illegal, but locals say it reflects a familiar mode of old school politics.

Mel has also been known to give out food baskets at holidays to residents and township employees. During a recent municipal meeting where he addressed critical coverage from a local newspaper, he brandished a wad of letters and cards he’d received from satisfied residents over the years.

“These are all thank yous,” he said. “Thank yous for what we’ve done, thank yous for how we’ve helped someone.”

“I think he’s influential because of how he treats people and the results that he produces.”

Former McKees Rocks mayor David Hershman, who maintained power from 1944 to 1968, set a defining tone in local politics that, some say, spilled over into surrounding communities. Hershman ran a tight political machine and was known for helping out residents when he could with store credit and other assistance, but he expected loyalty and

Not everyone in town, though, is quite so enamored.

During the 1999 primary election, Mel was accused of being inside the voting site while the polls were open. Poll Worker Bonnie Parent, daughter-in-law of Margie Parent, reportedly asked him to leave.

According to a contemporary report from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Mel said she called him a vulgar name.

Around the same time, Margie Parent says she insulted John’s educational background at a public meeting.

Bonnie and Margie Parent both received summons after the incidents, which would have carried a $350 fine each, but the charges were later dropped.

Kevin Parent said his family suffered, both from the incidents involving the summons and the lack of action after the ballot investigation. He no longer participates in Kennedy politics.

Against the critics, Mel and his peers say the township’s low tax rates, public parks, and well maintained roads speak only of his devoted public service.

“We’re talking about a gentleman who has been here serving Kennedy township for 50 years,” Commissioner Fred Kauffman said during a recent public meeting. “And when you look up and down, it’s gonna be pretty tough for you to tell which that person is, but I want to tell you, if you don’t know, it’s Mr. Weinstein.”

John began his career at a trucking firm in Beaver County where his father knew the owner. He was laid off after several years during a contraction and took a job in the county treasurer’s office in 1991.

Seven years later, he made his own run for treasurer. He won office and has secured reelection five times. He credits his father for the leg up.

“The base that I had was from Kennedy Township and from the western suburbs,” John says. “It was my dad that afforded that opportunity.”

In a crowded field of county executive candidates, John is touting his decades of political experience and a pragmatic moderate message under which he hopes to unite the county.

He says the recent scrutiny has only made him more determined to take the reins of county government — a goal now brought into focus by a vision of the future he hopes to leave for his children.

“My father has been my entire inspiration for my career,” John says. “Now, shifting gears, going from the treasurer’s office to the executive’s office, that has come to me from my kids. I have twins, I have a little boy and a little girl. They’re my whole life, and they have motivated me to run for this job.” •

BY M. J. LARSON // INFO@PGHCITYPAPER.COM

THERE IS A WAR being waged inside Riverview Park, and the aggressor is more adorable than you can imagine.

Graceful, yet skittish, with big eyes and voracious appetites, the deer that live in Pittsburgh’s parks and green spaces are eating their way toward ecological disaster. And with recent winters being milder, and no natural predators in their urban oases, the deer populations are only growing faster and more unfettered.

While this problem is not necessarily new, it does, at the very least, appear to be approaching a tipping point, after which it will become nearly impossible to keep them from living, eating, and breeding in our parks and neighborhoods, and wiping out our urban forests as we know them.

“High populations of deer can have severe and long-lasting impacts on our urban forest’s ecosystem,” Alana Wenk, director of advancement at the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy, tells Pittsburgh City Paper

The deer in the city’s parks, including Riverview, are causing a couple of big problems, according to Wenk.

“Deer typically cause physical damage through two primary mechanisms: direct browsing, which is the eating of leaves and new growth, and buck rubbing, which is tree damage from bucks rubbing their antlers on small trees during the mating season,” Wenk says. “This damage reduces the ability of forests to regenerate.”

According to retired University of Pittsburgh professor Dr. Walter Carson, who has studied deer and their negative effects on forest ecologies for decades, the issue is widespread.

“This is a problem nationwide,” he tells City Paper . “But deer have been overabundant in Pittsburgh, most likely, for a long time. The Pennsylvania Game Commission used to have a thing they called the ‘Game News,’ and in 1960, they had an issue entirely devoted to the deer problem.”

A destructive force

Having browsed and eaten many of their favorite species to the point where they are no longer available, the deer in Riverview Park are looking elsewhere to feed their appetites. Unfortunately for local residents, that often means that the deer end up in yards, feasting on flowers and gardens.

Alison Keating, a member of Friends of Riverview Park, a volunteer commit tee that works with the city and the Parks Conservancy to advocate for the park, agrees.

Keating, who lives in Manchester, says she joined the group after observing the deer in greater numbers, and recognizing that they cause a danger for motorists.

“Someone in our group asked animal control how many dead deer they’ve been picking up,” Keating tells the number is getting bigger and bigger. The number has been around 500 a year for the last couple of years. The majority of those are hit by cars.”

Keating says that 500 is a “good esti mate” for how many deer need to be removed from the park to start to control the population.

She said Friends of Riverview Park is working to do research and enlist public citizens, as well as community leaders to try to come up with solutions to control the deer population.

Who’s to blame?

In a February 2022 episode of its podcast, “For the Love of Parks,” the Parks Conservancy explored the deer problem in Riverview Park at length, offering up an interesting look at how the population has gotten so out of control.

“It’s tempting to think that deer are only in urban centers because we’ve destroyed their natural habitat, says podcast host Camila Rivera-Tinsley, a former director at Frick Environmental Center and current CEO of the Women and Girls Foundation of Southwestern PA. The assumption is that “as we build more condos and office parks in what used to be the far suburbs, deer are forced into the city and into the parks. But that’s not true. What’s more accurate is that wildlife is like water. It finds the cracks and seeps in. If you let it, it will take over. We haven’t destroyed the deer’s habitat. We’ve perfected it. They have no natural predators, and a lot to eat.”

Warming temperatures only cause more problems for the forest ecosystems when it comes to deer.

“Climate change is going to exacerbate the problem,” Carson says. “When we get a really hard winter, especially two years in a row, a lot of deer die, but that’s not happening anymore. Or at least it’s not common.”

Carson says it might be too late to fix the crisis he and his colleagues have worked for decades to prevent, citing a recent conversation with U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service research ecologist Alex Royo.

“Alex recently told me he’s in his mid-50s he said, ‘Walt, I don’t even like to talk about the deer problem anymore. I’ve been giving talks about the deer problem for 25 years and we’ve gained no traction.’”

Keating echoed that sentiment.

“It’s really hard to do something about a situation you’re completely ignoring,” she says.

Requests for comment from the City of Pittsburgh and the office of Mayor Ed Gainey were not answered.

City Councilman Bobby Wilson, who represents District 1, said he’s heard from constituents about the deer in Riverview Park, but he’s still unsure what, if anything, is a reasonable solution to controlling the population.

An unpopular solution

As the deer population gets larger, there are a number of ways to try to mitigate its damaging consequences.

For instance, the Parks Conservancy is using fencing and tree tubes to keep the deer from browsing growth and tree saplings. The group has also installed deer fences in some parks to keep deer out of areas where the group is attempting to perform forest and habitat restoration.

However, these efforts only focus on protecting small parts of the parks, and don’t address the broader problem of overpopulation.

Most experts agree it doesn’t make sense to introduce a new predator into city parks. (Wolves, bears, or bobcats running alongside mountain bikers and joggers? Not happening.) Sterilization is another idea, but it is expensive. A 2011 report by the New York Department of Environmental Conservation said the average cost of sterilization is about $1,200 per deer. A 2019 report from Ann Arbor, Mich. had similar findings, reporting costs as high as $1,500 per deer.

One solution, while wildly unpopular in residential areas, is to cull the deer, or allow sharpshooters and archers to hunt deer in Pittsburgh parks.

It’s an idea that comes with controversy and a lot of strings attached.

“This is a problem that is virtually intractable for multiple reasons,” Carson tells CP. “The first is, you’re going to have to kill a lot of deer. And there are going to be some people who lose their minds. Imagine you like the deer, and you feed the deer and someone says they are bringing in hired guns, using, basically sniper weapons? That’s not going over well.

“And deer reproduce. Rapidly. So you’re going to have to do that year after year after year after year. This is expensive to do. Now, you might be able to bring in bow hunters, because you can’t be unloading guns in neighborhoods. So you bring in bow hunters. Now, imagine the first time a bow hunter doesn’t [hit the deer] in the heart. And the deer runs into the neighbor’s yard and bleeds out right there. And brings the bow hunter out of the woods to get his deer. Imagine that scenario for people who may not understand hunting.”

Carson says that grizzly scenario is just one example of how things could go wrong. Ultimately, he fears the damage may have already been done.

“Because deer have overbrowsed both urban and rural forests for 30, 40, 50, 60 years … anything the deer likes to eat is gone,” Carson says. “Now they mosey into our neighborhoods, because we plant our gardens.”

Carson says that, from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan down to Georgia, out-of-control deer populations have overeaten native species to the point of destruction, making way for more exotic shrub species that the deer refuse to eat, and throwing our forest ecosystems out of whack.

“You can bring deer numbers down, but if you do, where are those native species supposed to come back from?”

According to Carson, in 2001, the Pennsylvania Game Commission, recognizing there was a deer problem, built and maintained fences in the Allegheny National Forest.

“Over the last six or seven years, we went in and studied what happens when you remove deer for 20 years,” Dr. Carson says. “No plants came back. Because species that the deer like to eat are gone.”

So what’s next?

When asked for his take on the future, Carson is not optimistic.

“A collapse of our urban forests,” he says. “In my view, it’s a fait accompli. The deer have been overabundant for 50 plus years, and the invasive species are taking over.”

Now, a collapse doesn’t mean the forest is going to be replaced with a giant smoking crater. Rather, it’s just going to become unfamiliar to us over time.

Carson describes a hypothetical scenario where deer browse on tree saplings, which will cause a slowing of new tree growth. In turn, the forest floor becomes covered not with new trees, but with nonnative shrubbery that the deer won’t eat. Eventually, mature trees will die and fall over, giving more sunlight to the shrub, which will continue to take over the floor, essentially choking out any native growth.

The end result is no longer a tree covered forest, but a giant field of invasive, exotic shrubbery.

“Something will be there,” he said. “The green space isn’t just going to disappear. But it’s very likely that it will be completely unrecognizable from what we’ve known. It will no longer be the forest as we know it.” •