News

More than a dozen outraged city residents gathered on the South Side Tuesday night, promising to show up at the City-County Building on Monday with as many as 10,000 Pittsburgh residents to protest Mayor Tom Murphy's decision to close 19 recreation centers.

The police are getting a compromise deal designed to prevent the 102 layoffs announced for that department. Many, if not all, of the 202 school crossing guards might be saved by a burden-sharing agreement among the Pittsburgh Public Schools, the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh and the Murphy administration.

So the South Side residents wonder: Where is the city's compromise with the children who need the recreation centers to keep them off the streets and out of trouble?

"We're not fighting to keep all the rec centers," said Richard Baranowski, of Carrick, who handed out fliers about the upcoming protest at last night's citizens meeting in Armstrong Park. "We're just asking for a bargain -- not to shut them all down and give the kids nothing."

The South Side residents, who use the South Side Market House center on Bingham Street, are just one group organizing protesters for Monday. In addition to that rally, which will start at 4 p.m., the recreation center staff members who once planned Little League games and touch football tournaments for those residents' children are calling on everyone who has used city recreation programs -- from kids to their parents, siblings, grandparents and other family members -- to turn out for a family protest rally at Point State Park at 10 a.m. that day.

Among other issues, they are protesting the elimination of 32 rank-and-file jobs while four recreation center supervisors, an assistant recreation center director and three swimming pool supervisors continue collecting their pay, said Kathy Blake, president of the Pittsburgh local of the Service Employees International Union. Blake also is a director at the Sheraden Senior Center, which will remain open while its auxiliary, Win-Char on Clarkton Street, closes.

"Who are they going to direct? The pools are closed," Blake said at last night's meeting of recreation center employees inside the United Way offices on Smithfield Street.

Recreation center employees, who are supposed to receive two weeks' notification before being laid off, will get their formal notification on Friday just before they are sent home, Blake said. The city, however, will continue paying them for an additional two weeks to comply with the 14-day notification requirement in their contract, she said.

• Most Read
• Most E-mailed
• Latest News