The City of Pittsburgh Standing Committee met on Wednesday, February 11, 2026, at 10:00 AM in Council Chambers to consider a range of legislative items including a referendum on budget approval rules, a settlement warrant, departmental invoices, grant amendments for infrastructure projects, and two bills regulating short-term rentals. The meeting also featured extensive public testimony on short-term rental impacts and concluded with approval of multiple resolutions and referrals.
As advocacy consultant or upstream Pittsburgh and the Environmental Justice Table consultant and the Action Oversight Committee consultant for environmental justice. The environmental justice team and the work that they do on equitable equitable construction policies in Pittsburgh demonstrates that environmental outcomes are directly shaped by governance processes, public participation, and equitable access to information. Communities most impacted by demolition practices, environmental exposure, and redevelopment decisions rely on timely notice, transparency, budgeting, and accessible public engagement to protect health land use stability and community continuity. Procedure safeguards addressed in bills 2026-0039 and 2026-0040 are foundational to advancing environmental justice policies goals, including responsible deconstruction practices, equitable resource allocation, and community-informed environment of decision making. Strengthening participation mechanisms supports the city's capacity to implement environmental justice policies effectively and equitably across resident and community member communities, and the separate and distinct communities have Aboriginal American Nations people. Thank you so much for keeping transparency in line with environmental justice depressed communities. Thank you. Thank you. Our next speaker is MJ Shaehan. So we are just working to enable the camera so we can have our interpreter. We're working on our end here to get the video up, so just working on it. Thank you. Hello, hi there. Hi everyone. My name is MJ Shaheen. I'm a deaf individual. I'm in the Pittsburgh area. My question is this. Airbnbs in this area. It's not good. For example, for the lights for deaf people. Where's the lighting for deaf people? For doors, doorbells, they need flashing signals. There aren't any. You know, there's some number, key cooks, keypads, and then for entry, a fire alarm. There's no flashing fire alarms or requirements. So you can smell the smoke from a fire, and there's an alarm, or car sorry, or a carbon monoxide alarm that's ownerless and you and there's no flashing alarm. The TV, a lot of them have not set up closed captioning. I have the remote, I'm looking, I'm searching for the captioning, and they need to explain that on the list. Because all TVs are different. They're different systems, they have different needs. So it should explain here's how to access captioning on this television and this Airbnb. A few different examples. We need ADA laws to be followed, all of them for, you know, and they need to be deaf friendly. So in the community, we have a, for example, we have an Airbnb, we have, you know, so there's a whole lot, there's a whole lot of them. The whole area needs to be more deaf friendly and accessible. There's something to think about, okay? If if you have any questions, let me know. Are there any questions? We as counsel are not permitted to respond to public comment, but certainly we can open a line of communication outside of this public comment period. Okay. Yeah, please, but don't forget because the deaf community absolutely needs to follow the AD, or sorry, the city of Pittsburgh and the Airbnb needs to follow the ADA laws for equal accessibility for all deaf people. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Our next speaker is Callie DeSabado. Hello, can you all hear me? I can hear you. Um, my name is Callie De Savateau, and I live in the north side. So last night at the Houseback Community Meeting, Zone One police officers fielded a number of questions about short-term rentals. I want to be clear that the heart of this issue is not policing issue, and policing will not be the solution to a problem.