It has been a long time coming for Hays Woods, known by locals as “Forty Acres,” which spans the city’s Hays neighborhood between the south bank of the Monongahela River and adjacent Baldwin Borough. For most of the 1900s, it was owned J&L Steel and LTV Steel, which maintained a research lab on a small corner of the site. The property is still honeycombed with abandoned coal mines, and while mine subsidence and runoff remain a problem, people left the forest and its native ecosystem mostly undisturbed.

In 2003, developer Chuck Betters purchased the Hays Woods property with the intention of strip mining most of the land and flattening it to build a horse racetrack and casino, with on-site housing and retail. He found opposition at the time from then-Councilman Peduto, who was one of two council members to vote against the proposal, and the only city official to speak out against the proposal at a Horse Racing Commission hearing.

The state Department of Environmental Protection ruled against Betters’ mining permit in 2006, and the state’s Environmental Hearing Board affirmed the ruling in 2009, effectively sinking the project.

Task force member and former Pittsburgh Mayor Tom Murphy said he remained in touch with Betters over the years, and not long after Betters’ PDG Land Development Group dropped its legal appeal in 2010, he approached Murphy with a desire to turn the land over to the city. Murphy then convened a group of nonprofit partners to start a conversation about how that might happen.

Peduto said he started to have conversations about Hays Woods shortly after he assumed the mayorship in 2014. Those early discussions, he said, included meetings with the head of a local environmental organization, who proposed the land be donated to the city in exchange for Betters retaining fracking rights underneath the property, facilitated by horizontal drilling from well pads in neighboring Baldwin.

Peduto turned down that proposal, and in June 2016, the city announced it would purchase the 660 acres of deep brush and steeply wooded hillsides from Betters for $5 million, including mineral rights. In November 2017, over opposition from a few dozen attendees of a public meeting, the city’s Urban Redevelopment Authority voted to transfer 555 acres to the city while setting aside about 75 acres for development, something URA Executive Director Robert Rubinstein said was requested specifically by the mayor’s office, and it is still the authority’s intention to develop that portion of land. The URA has yet to transfer any of the 660 acres to the city.

Rubinstein said the URA opted out of participating in the task force because it was “seemingly likely from the outset that the recommendations were not gonna be consistent with the initial purpose that the city asked for us to acquire.”

So far, the URA has recovered $3 million of the $5 million purchase price from various state and nonprofit grants. Rubinstein said that before the URA transfers the land to the city, “there is a 2 million dollar number that we would need to be made whole.”