Can Pittsburgh divest from genocide? No, say the city controller and Pa. courts

On March 7, the Not on Our Dime campaign withdrew its petitions for a ballot referendum that would have prevented the City of Pittsburgh from doing business with governments actively engaged in genocide, ethnic cleansing, or apartheid — specifying Israel’s ongoing actions in the Gaza Strip.

The withdrawal marked the second time in as many years that the group, previously known as No War Crimes on Our Dime, ended a ballot initiative aimed at divestment amidst legal challenges. After gathering more than 21,000 signatures, which appear in court documents over 1,500 pages, Not on Our Dime stipulated it did not meet the required threshold of 12,500 valid signatures.

As with its last effort, the campaign faced objections filed in the Allegheny County Common Pleas Court by the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh and City Controller Rachael Heisler. Among other legal concerns, the Federation challenged the referendum based on “material errors and defects,” including not obtaining the requisite number of valid signatures. Heisler’s petition raised broader legal questions about the substance of the ballot question, which would have amended Pittsburgh’s Home Rule Charter.

Ahead of the first of two scheduled court dates, Not on Our Dime declared its intention to withdraw. In a 20-minute hearing before Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge John T. McVay Jr., lawyers hashed out how to manage the case, determining whether Not On Dime’s petitions would be withdrawn, effectively rendering legal challenges moot, or whether the campaign would stipulate to a dismissal signed by McVay finding the petition had a signature deficiency. 

Attorney Ron Hicks, representing the Jewish Federation — and who previously served as legal counsel to Donald Trump in his attempts to overturn the 2020 election — argued for the latter approach because it would allow his clients to file for reimbursement of legal fees.

“We’re engaged in some kind of law school class here,” Chuck Pascal, attorney for Not on Our Dime, told the court. Pascal tells Pittsburgh City Paper that once his clients made the decision to withdraw, he’d sought to cancel the hearing.

“It’s punitive,” Pascal says of the legal fee petition. “That’s why they keep wanting to have their show trial here.”

The limits of divestment

While the volunteer-led Not on Our Dime campaign has been characterized by its opponents and some media outlets as a failure and a loss, founder and steering committee member Ben Case tells City Paper that it’s led to “a lot of good conversations.”

“Despite it really being a tough pill to swallow, energy is pretty high, and there’s momentum to build on here,” Case says.

“I think there’s one sense in which [the description of ‘failure’] is true. If the goal was to put this on the ballot, it failed to reach the ballot,” Case says. “I think it failed because of lawfare, [which] was successful … It is a failure of democracy, because what we were trying to do was put this up for a vote.”

Had Not on Our Dime succeeded at getting the referendum on the ballot, and it passed, it would have been one of the first divestment initiatives in the U.S. to pass by popular vote. Due to the petitions’ withdrawal, legal challenges won’t be heard in court, but, according to Pascal, the case also had the potential to set precedent for Pennsylvania election law.

Objections filed by Controller Heisler and her counsel also revealed information about Pittsburgh’s budget and the ways in which, by Heisler’s own admission, the city may already do extensive business with “bad-acting governments,” as they’re called in her court filing, in the manner that Not on Our Dime’s referendum sought to address. (The Controller’s Office did not respond to several requests for comment.)

A Feb. 25 press release announcing Controller Heisler’s court filing stated that the ballot question would “[create] an undue burden on the Controller’s office and City government,” as it “would significantly disrupt City operations due to the City’s dependence on the global economy.”

The statement goes on to give examples of governments accused of slave labor and genocide that the city ostensibly already conducts business with, claiming that 20% of all U.S. imports originate from China, “which has regularly been accused of carrying out a genocide against the Uyghur population since 2017.” 

The release further speculates the referendum could prohibit the City from procuring any item using cobalt-based lithium batteries, which are “mined by workers laboring in slave-like conditions.”

“Who has a smartphone?” Heisler asked the media in a press conference following the March 7 court hearing. “I’m guessing everybody. Apple and Google were sued by the International Rescue Committee because the material that is in this phone and in every phone in this room was mined by child labor in the Democratic Republic of [the] Congo … They’re in my car, they’re probably in yours. And no one’s talking about those issues.”

Case says these issues represent precisely what Not on Our Dime hoped to address and could be a point of commonality if Heisler is raising them in good faith. 

“It seems to me that what Rachael Heisler is suggesting is that our city’s functions are dependent upon doing business with and sending money to a state that’s currently committing genocide and ethnic cleansing,” Case tells CP. 

Heisler’s court filing goes into even further detail. Statements by the Fraternal Order of Police and Fraternal Association of Professional Paramedics, attached as exhibits to Heisler’s filing, attest that the amendment, if implemented, would “substantially prohibit” the City’s ability to procure Naloxone, a life-saving drug that reverses opioid overdose, as one-third of the world’s supply originates with Teva Pharmaceuticals, headquartered in Tel Aviv, Israel. The City’s police officers state they use body cameras, vests, and vehicles from companies, including weapons manufacturers, that do business with Israel.

Pascal, Not on Our Dime’s attorney, also points out that were the city to decide Israel is not committing genocide, ethnic cleansing, or apartheid, the amendment would have no effect.

“Can we agree, then, that the State of Israel is committing genocide and ethnic cleansing and running an apartheid regime? Because I think that would be a step in the right direction,” Case says. “If we could all agree that is what’s happening, then we could talk about how we want to proceed as a city … I think it is fully possible for the City of Pittsburgh to thrive while not sending our taxpayer money or doing business with countries that are engaged in genocide.”

Though her court filing, her office’s initial press release, and her public statement at the courthouse name other countries that could have fallen under the referendum’s scope, Heisler nonetheless called out Israel being highlighted, saying it’s “suspicious” to single out the majority-Jewish country when “there are atrocities happening literally around the world.”

Case says that Not on Our Dime specifically incorporated criticism and broadened their amendment after researching the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. Had divestment measures against apartheid governments been put in place previously, they would apply to Israel now, representing the campaign’s goal to align with “universal moral principles” and divest from any bad-acting government.

“People like to say that a city’s budget is a moral decision about how we spend our money,” Case tells CP. “And so that’s what this is about. [Heisler’s] examples just illustrate to me that there are alternative choices.”

Both Case and Pascal question if Heisler’s arguments are being made sincerely, with Case remarking that, if implementation were truly the stumbling block, no effort has been made to reach out to Not on Our Dime outside of court proceedings.

“I think a lot of these arguments align with what we see from the Israel lobby more broadly,” Case says. “They’re manipulating information and twisting facts to make it seem like there’s no alternative to dumping U.S. taxpayer dollars into a foreign country that’s committing genocide, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid.”

Though representatives of the Jewish Federation stressed its independence from Heisler in an interview with CP, the organization held a joint press conference with the controller, along with Beacon Coalition and StandWithUs, following the March 7 court hearing. Heisler is listed as part of the board of directors for Jewish Family and Community Services, a partner of the Jewish Federation, and notes she was a 2022-23 Wechsler Fellow with the Jewish Federation in her official biography. (Heisler’s office has told other outlets she is not Jewish.)

Heisler is within her legal rights to file objections to the referendum. However, it’s unclear to what extent a city controller, who directly oversees city tax dollars, challenging a city budget-related referendum on the use of those dollars could represent a conflict of interest, according to Case.

“As I understand it, the Controller’s job is to do the city’s accounting and budgeting in accordance with the will of the voters, not to dictate to voters what they do and don’t get to decide about how our tax dollars are spent,” Case tells CP.

Court documents also show Heisler’s lawyers planned for an extensive hearing, with a list of 30 witnesses including Heisler. Pascal estimates it could have prolonged proceedings until May, nearing the primary election date.

“Listen, here’s the deal: we can say anything we want in a political campaign,” Pascal tells CP. “We can embellish. But my point is, this is a court. You don’t do that there.”

An “expensive distraction”?

The end of Not on Our Dime’s current campaign also augurs poorly for direct democracy, Case believes.

Pascal is an attorney who specializes in ballot referendum challenges, and names one hurdle as Pennsylvania’s Act 77, the election law that created the state’s vote-by-mail system in 2019. While Pascal describes the law as “one of the worst-written pieces of legislation,” parts of which were later challenged in the state Supreme Court, it also established a lesser-known rule for Pennsylvanians signing referendum petitions.

Under Act 77, voters’ signatures are only valid if they write the address where they’re registered to vote (rather than where they live), even if they are registered voters in that city. 

“There’s some places in the city where two or three or four precincts vote at the same place,” Pascal explains. “So in my mind, as a regular person, not as somebody who knows the law, what’s the difference?”

Pascal believes incorrect addresses represented a significant percentage of the signature challenges made to the Not on Our Dime petitions. Signatures can also be invalidated for illegibility, an incomplete address line, or voters writing their zip code after their address rather than their city or the date. In addition, if people collecting ballot referendum signatures, referred to as circulators, write their own county of residence rather than the county where voters are signing, signatures can be invalidated. Pascal says many circulators write “demonstration” lines with their own information (which may also be written incorrectly) to show voters how to fill out the petition, which Jewish Federation lawyers alleged constituted circulator fraud.

Case says that Not on Our Dime validated signatures from more than 12,500 registered Pittsburgh voters, but not that met state signature requirements. The campaign also looked into changing the petition form to make it clearer for voters, but couldn’t alter it by state law.

“The bar is way too high. There’s no question,” Case says. “The thing that’s really upsetting, and I hesitate to say this because I believe in direct democracy, is that what I think this process showed is that, if there is an opposition with lots of resources, it’s next to impossible to put a question on the ballot in Pittsburgh unless you also have a lot of money.”

The last petition-driven ballot referendums passed in Pittsburgh were the no-knock warrant and solitary confinement bans, which passed in May 2021 with 81% of the vote. Case points out neither question faced legal challenges before appearing on the ballot, and signature collection was bolstered by paid organizers.

Asked about avenues for divestment, the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh wrote to CP, “We believe that individuals and nonprofits have the right to make their own investment decisions. Pittsburghers and our elected officials are committed to ensuring that tax dollars and investments contribute to positive, socially responsible outcomes. Boycotts, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) run counter to that goal.”

The Jewish Federation told CP their organization has a policy of making no direct financial investments in Iran, but they do not consider this to be divestment. Regarding the legal fee petition, the Federation commented that it’s pursuing avenues within its legal rights.

Some of Controller Heisler’s last public words on the matter were to characterize the Not on Our Dime referendum as “expensive” and “a distraction.”

As of this writing, Israeli forces have violated the temporary ceasefire agreement brokered in January, resuming airstrikes in the Gaza Strip that have killed 400 people including children.

Case believes public opinion on the conflict is turning, especially as national polling shows American support for Israel is at its lowest point in 25 years. As noted in a Not on Our Dime press release, their initial campaign was motivated by widespread support for an arms embargo on Israel.

Case says the biggest mischaracterization of the Not on Our Dime campaign is that they were trying to “force” policy, rather than appeal to what they view as a growing and increasingly concerned segment of Pittsburghers.

“We were trying to vote on it,” Case tells CP. “If you’re so confident that we’re a minority opinion, wouldn’t you let it go to a vote? I want the people who disagree with this to be able to vote, sincerely, [because] that’s what democracy is.”

This article appears in Mar 19-25, 2025.