Paige Cognetti is running on ‘transparency’ but has faced criticism from Scranton’s city council for withholding budget information while campaigning for Congress
The Democratic nominee in Pennsylvania’s Eighth Congressional District, Scranton mayor Paige Cognetti, is receiving sharp criticism from city council members and her own constituents for being absent from council meetings as she runs for the House of Representatives.
Scranton resident Rik Little used a public comment period during a July 16 council meeting to slam Cognetti over her continued failure to attend municipal government proceedings, records show.
“We got a mayor who’s not here,” Little said. “The mayor should be here every week.”
Councilman Sean McAndrew agreed, saying during the meeting that “the only thing [he knows] about the mayor’s five-year outlook is she doesn’t plan to be here. She plans to be in Congress.”
The criticism came as the council debated a $1.9 million deal between Scranton and Fidelity D&D Bancorp, the holding company for the Pennsylvania-based Fidelity Bank, that would have the city purchase the bank’s old headquarters to use as a municipal building. Cognetti added the deal to the city’s budget in November 2025, and an outgoing council voted 3-2 to authorize the purchase and fund a 10 percent deposit the following month. The city’s current council has since accused Cognetti of withholding information about the deal—most notably its budget projection—as it nears completion.
“I’ve been asking for that five-year budget projection that’s prepared by [the Pennsylvania Economy League] since June, since it was supposedly submitted to the city, which was in June,” McAndrew said at the recent council meeting. Council president Thomas Schuster confirmed that the mayor’s office did receive the projection but has not handed it over to the council.
“We were worried about some holes that might possibly be in our budget, and now that the budget is being—it has passed, it’s time for council to get a copy of the PEL five-year projection,” he said. “So, we do know that the administration does have that projection in their hands.”
Cognetti’s handling of the deal is at odds with the image she has presented while running to unseat Republican incumbent Rob Bresnahan.
Cognetti says she’s running to “bring reform, transparency, and government accountability” to Northeastern Pennsylvania, “a place sadly known for public corruption.” She also refers to herself as “Paige Against the Machine,” a reference to her first mayoral campaign, which saw her run as an independent over a disagreement with the local Democratic Party’s primary system. She ran for reelection as a Democrat—and has faced accusations of self-dealing over her relationship with Fidelity.
Cognetti pushed to purchase the old Fidelity building after she helped secure a $5 million grant from Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro in November 2024 to renovate the bank’s new headquarters in downtown Scranton. Months later, in April 2025, all nine members of Fidelity’s board contributed $1,500 to Cognetti’s mayoral campaign, records first reported by Politico show. That included Cognetti’s uncle-in-law, John Cognetti, the board’s secretary.
Less than a year after receiving the contributions, “council members learned that Cognetti had added an item to the budget requesting the city purchase Fidelity’s old headquarters to convert it into an extension of City Hall, despite a recent costly renovation,” Politico wrote. McAndrew, the city council member, voted against the purchase, saying, “If I was to vote yes, then I would vote yes to a conflict and a behavior that I am uncomfortable with.”
McAndrew and others also criticized Cognetti for the way she “rushed” the outgoing council into approving the deal “without actually having inspections in hand, appraisals in hand, formal written plans.” Another councilman, Patrick Flynn, called the December vote to authorize the purchase “utterly ridiculous” but voted to release the remaining funds for fear that the city would not get its near-$200,000 down payment back from Fidelity if it exited the deal.
“I found it to be a bit ridiculous how this all went down last year in the 11th hour and what could be considered as nothing other than a lame duck Council,” he said. “To push this through before the new members were seated I don’t think was fair to the residents and the taxpayers of the city of Scranton … I find that to be utterly ridiculous.”
Cognetti’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
The dual Fidelity deals are not the first time Cognetti has come under fire for contradicting her “transparency” pledge. As the Washington Free Beacon reported in May, Cognetti failed to list a ski home inside a gated community that describes itself as a “Fairy Tale” resort on her most recent financial disclosures. She has also made “cutting waste” a key component of her campaign, but a year after becoming mayor, she commissioned a $75,000 “equity” plan to place DEI “at the core of every decision” in city government, the Free Beacon reported.
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