Joy Darden-Pipkins has been taking care of her godmother for around 20 years without being paid.
“It’s a labor of love,” she said, adding she is grateful to be married to a man who makes enough money to pay the bills and the mortgage.
Darden-Pipkins was one of around 30 people who gathered in the parking lot of the Penn Hills office of U.S. Rep. Conor Lamb, D-Mt. Lebanon, on Tuesday. The group gathered to thank Lamb for his support of raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. They also urged him to keep fighting by pressuring colleagues who do not support the change.
Margaret J. Krauss / 90.5 WESA
In 2014, the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority spent $13 million dollars on its infrastructure, the pumps and pipes that make up its water and sewer systems. This year, PWSA’s board approved a capital budget of $233 million.
For decades the approach to maintenance at PWSA was “fix-as-fail,” said Edward Barca, the agency’s director of finance. In practice, that meant things literally had to fall apart to merit attention. That old mindset kept rates low, but it helped create a lead crisis and a deep backlog of very expensive maintenance.
“What we re looking to spend and put back into the system … it’s over a billion dollars over the next five years,” Barca said.