Pittsburgh City Council appears ready to raise property taxes for the first time in 12 years, with one member calling for an increase of 30%. 

Councilmembers say there's no way to avoid it, as the city's fleet is on its last legs, there's runaway overtime and Downtown building assessments and tax revenues have plummeted. Councilwoman Barb Warwick says a 30% real estate tax increase is needed to plug a $30 million hole in the city budget, a measure she concedes would be wildly unpopular. 

"Nobody wants to do this," Warwick said. "Certainly no elected official wants to do this, but our job at city council is to be the fiscal stewards of the city."

"It sounds like a big number, but at the end of the day, for the average Pittsburgher, you're looking at an increase of about $20 a month," Warwick added.

Councilmembers call Mayor Ed Gainey's proposed no-tax increase budget a fiction, saying it fails to take into account rising costs from overtime to the city's electric bill to the condition of the fleet. The mayor has budgeted only $10 million for new vehicles, but Warwick and others say that number needs to be doubled at a minimum. 

"We're looking at having ambulances break down on the way to the hospital," Warwick said. "We just can't have that."

On a house assessed at $100,000, Warwick says the city real estate bill would jump $240 a year from $800 to $1,040 a year. Councilman Bobby Wilson calls that way too high, especially with utility bills rising and the Pittsburgh Public School board proposing a tax increase of its own.

"We should make all the necessary cuts in city government before we even look to see what taxes should be increased," Wilson said. "To put it on the back of homeowners, on working families, that's not the direction we should go."

Members of the council's finance committee are crafting another plan that would call for a 5% across-the-board cut in all city departments, including freezing contributions to the city's Stop the Violence Trust fund, which has an unspent balance of more than $12 million. Even still, Chairwoman Erika Strassburger says some increase in taxes will be necessary. 

"I don't take the decision to raise taxes lightly," she said. "I absolutely don't. I don't think any councilmembers does, and we wouldn't be doing this unless it was absolutely necessary."

Whatever the solution, the council will need to come to an agreement before the end of the month. The public will have its say at a hearing a few days before Christmas.