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When life-long Homewood resident Victoria Young thinks of former Pittsburgh City Councilor Twanda Carlisle, she fondly remembers the time they spent singing in the church choir together.
“Her and her mom are wonderful people,” Young says today. “She’s such a wonderful person.”
It bothers Young little that her former elected representative was convicted of misappropriating public funds for personal use during her time in office. But Carlisle’s checkered history certainly won’t stop Young from voting to return her to council in the May 19 primary.
“She was doing wonderful when she was on [council] before,” says Young. “She’s been someone who listens and cares about what the community wants.”
Young’s opinion of Carlisle is not as uncommon throughout District 9 as one might think, especially in Homewood and the East Hills where 56-year-old Carlisle has lived most of her life. On this side of town, bonds formed in church and between families over generations are hard to break. But are they enough to earn Carlisle the necessary votes to return to council? And if she does win, will she even be legally eligible to serve?
“I’ll vote for her,” Young says. “And I’m hoping and praying that when she gets on [council] this time, she doesn’t mess it up.”
The primary will pit Carlisle against incumbent District 9 Councilor Rev. Ricky Burgess, entrepreneur Andre Young and community-development organizer Judith Ginyard. But for Carlisle, the election will be about more than overcoming her opponents; she’ll have to face her own demons and win back the public’s trust.
“I want to be the representative that I was before, who made sure the voice of the community was heard,” says Carlisle. “It’s time for me to be given an opportunity to show the community I’ve paid for my mistake and I’m better than I was before and I’d never make the same mistake twice.”
Carlisle served on council from 2002 to 2007 before resigning while under indictment on charges of theft and criminal conspiracy. In November 2007, she pled no contest to and was convicted of diverting $42,000 in public money for personal use.
In February 2008, she was sentenced to one to two years in a state prison. She was released from prison into a halfway house in December, and was placed on parole the following March. (See video above for details.)
Eight years later, Carlisle, who has been working for the Pittsburgh branch of the NAACP, where her mother is president, says her ordeal was a learning experience and that she wants another shot at public service.
“I was doing very well on Pittsburgh City Council — loved by most, not all — and I fell down,” Carlisle says. “And when I fell down, I fell hard because it was a public fall and not only did I fall, but it hurt my family. I’m still trying to get back up, and every day I look in the mirror and say, ‘Do better than you did yesterday.'”
Carlisle spoke to City Paper recently about her past service, her legal troubles and her decision to run again for council. But when she talks about that time, she doesn’t use those actual phrases. For example, she refers to her conviction as “falling down.” She calls her prison sentence “time away.”
But that doesn’t mean she’s running away from that part of her past. In fact, these experiences, she says, have given her the ability to relate to her constituents on a different level. District 9, which encompasses Homewood, Garfield, Larimer, Lincoln Lemington-Belmar, Point Breeze, Friendship, East Hills and parts of East Liberty, has some of the highest rates of poverty and unemployment in the city.
“I’ve been through the fire and know what it feels like to be burned and be hot. I say with all due respect to the entire community, sometimes you have to feel what people are feeling,” Carlisle says. “Right now I can tell you what it feels like to owe everybody.
“Anytime you pick up the telephone, there’s a bill collector on the telephone and you’ve got to try to make payments. You’re robbing Peter to pay Paul.”
And Carlisle can also relate to constituents who are passed over for employment because of their criminal history. Since she announced her candidacy, her ability as a convicted felon to legally serve on city council has been called into question, though none of her opponents challenged her election petitions.
While nothing in state law bars a felon from running for elected office, they are prohibited from serving. After they are elected, their position can be challenged in the courts. But the official is not automatically blocked from serving, and a challenge cannot be made until the official takes office.
If elected, Carlisle says, she’ll take the fight to retain her seat to court. And she says similar battles elsewhere have seen elected officials serve out their terms before courts were able to reach a decision. For, example, in Montgomery County, Pa., Conshohocken Borough Councilor Pete Cianci served a full four-year term despite a 1993 conviction for drug possession.
“It’s not just about me, it’s about all of us,” says Carlisle. “Anybody who’s had a problem with the law and you’re trying to get a job and somebody tells you, ‘You can’t do that job,’ well, you served your time and you should be able to get that job now. People should be able to do what they love to do, if they know how to do it well.”
Carlisle says she is running to represent all of the district’s constituents — even those who might not have a voice because of their pasts.
“I don’t mind talking to the young men with their pants hanging down to get their perspective because that’s somebody’s child. We have to start changing how we perceive our community and being scared in our community. These are our kids,” Carlisle explains. “When I went away, I saw people who don’t really need to be there; they need help.”
While her history might be hard to live down, Carlisle says people should remember her work on council to fund community programs in her district and secure contracts for African-American developers. And this time around, Carlisle says, she would be more committed than ever to transparency on city council and in her personal life.
There are many constituents without personal ties to Carlisle who remember her for the positive aspects of her tenure on council. As CP informally canvassed Pittsburgh’s eastern neighborhoods last week, it’s obvious she still has her supporters.
“She was good before,” says James Perry, owner of Perry’s Honeydipper grocery store. “She always cared about what the community wanted. I’m going to vote for her.”
Whether Carlisle has enough supporters to win an election is another matter. After all, she has lost an election to incumbent Burgess before. After she was indicted in 2007, she lost the May primary to Burgess, who nabbed 50 percent of the vote.
Carlisle says the result of that election does not reflect her record on council. Instead, she claims, voters were swayed by media coverage of her indictment.
“In fact, on the day of the election, the media showed me going to the magistrate and a lot of my senior citizens said they thought I was being taken to jail right then,” says Carlisle. “It was the day of the election, how it was portrayed on TV, that swayed a lot of people.”
While there was a lot of media coverage of Carlisle’s legal problems, it’s still a pretty good bet that it was the actual allegations of misusing public money that turned voters against her. A former aide of Carlisle’s testified that she was hired in exchange for giving Carlisle a portion of her salary. Other charges included paying consultants for work on a suspicious health study and buying items like trips to Las Vegas, fur coats and TVs.
At this point, Burgess has completed nearly two terms on council, and plenty in the district are happy with his work.
“Rev. Burgess has done a lot for our community,” says Stanley Dennison, senior pastor of Homewood AME Zion Church, where Carlisle is a parishioner. When asked if Carlisle should serve on council again, he adds, “I believe everyone deserves a second chance, but not necessarily in this instance.”
Carlisle takes comments like this from her critics personally.
“For the ones who say I don’t deserve a second chance, I say everybody makes mistakes,” says Carlisle. “If they’re looking in the mirror, they’ve made some. I’m somebody’s daughter; I’m somebody’s sister, aunt. I could be their family. And you don’t think they deserve a second chance in this lifetime? That’s a sad statement to make.”
But under the circumstances, says University of Pittsburgh political communications professor Jerry Shuster, it’s easy to see where constituents are coming from.
“Obviously, given what she is alleged to have done, that in itself would make distrust almost automatic,” he says. “As a candidate, it’s difficult under any circumstances to overcome issues in your background that clearly challenge the honesty and integrity and ethics of the candidate.”
The difficulty, says Shuster, comes from the integrity deficit many politicians already face. Political scandal and corruption are all too common and have left many voters highly distrustful of elected officials. And in this case, Carlisle misappropriated public funds while serving in the exact same office she wants voters to return her to.
“Most people have a very narrow and skewed view of what politicians are like to begin with,” says Shuster. “There’s the old story that if you go down the list of people who are most trusted, politicians and used-car salespeople are near the last in the list. Many people think politicians do dishonest things routinely, so they’re not going to add more fuel to the fire.”
For the next few months, Carlisle says, she will spend her time trying to rebuild the trust her constituents once placed in her.
“I believe in redemption,” says Carlisle. “And I want to know, do the voters believe in it too?”
This article appears in Apr 1-7, 2015.
