An arrangement by which an Allegheny County Airport Authority board member has become a non-voting member of an airline that was granted public incentives to fly in and out of Pittsburgh International Airport has sparked the interest of the state auditor general.
Sent a newspaper story outlining the arrangement – involving OneJet and dual board member Bob Lewis – state Auditor General Eugene DePasquale told me in an email that the arrangement “seems to give a private company a huge upper hand against competitors.”
Which could make competitors think twice about doing business at Pittsburgh International – with or without the generous subsidies for which the authority has become so well known.
“If the (state Legislature) bill passes granting me authority on public authorities,” DePasquale says the OneJet-Lewis situation “is worth exploring.”
For, as has been noted here before, and in the least, the optics of such a deal have the appearance of a troubling conflict of interest, if not an actual conflict.
And it raises this question as well: Is the Airport’s Authority’s job to facilitate and oversee air travel at Pittsburgh International or is it to be in the business of helping to run and publicly finance private air transit?
Indeed, there are a number of sound recommendations in a “blue ribbon” panel’s report on how to fix the badly broken Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority (though some do appear to be a cut-and-paste job that mimic recommendations already made by DePasquale’s office).
Among them are clear no-brainers, such as no longer providing the city government and certain related parties with free water. Another is to stop overpaying the city for administrative services it provides.
Yet another is to stop subsidizing development projects. The PWSA often is asked to provide water and sewer infrastructure that should be paid for by the developer, the report notes.
“This should cease immediately,” it concludes. “PWSA should be run as a utility, not an economic development agency.”
If only government in general would operate this way, taxpayers would be spared elected and appointed officials’ market-perverting corporate wealthfare schemes that improperly offload capital costs to taxpayers that should be borne solely by developers.
Once upon a more rational time, developers whose projects created demand on the public infrastructure were charged an impact fee to pay for it. Imagine that.
Now, as much positive as there is in the panel’s PWSA report, there remains one giant sore thumb. That would be the half-measures proposed to improve the authority’s governance model.
The authority, as are most Pittsburgh authorities, long has been a political tool for elected leaders. They appoint board members and those members, instead of acting independently, merely do the bidding of their political benefactor.
The “reform” calls for Pittsburgh’s mayor to appoint, at least initially, a “board of nominators” from a list supplied by that “blue ribbon panel” to nominate new PWSA members. The authority would be reorganized as a municipal authority “to make it independent of elective politics and accountable to and trusted by the public,” the report says.
But the panel expressly rejects any hint of privatizing to any degree, leaving ownership in the city’s hands. From the report:
“All of the alternatives that include some degree of privatization were judged to be weak in terms of accountability and the public’s confidence in them,” it said.
But then comes the nub of the rub, so to speak: “These options would also be difficult or impossible to implement politically, and they have uncertain implications for employees.”
Really?
First, never mind that the PWSA, which now also will be forced to answer to the state Public Utility Commission, has, for decades, redefined oversight and operational dysfunction.
Second, never mind that the “blue ribbon panel” demands, supposedly, that “politics” be divorced from the authority, then cowers to it.
And, third, goodness forbid that apolitical and operational efficiencies might lower costs, it appears that the reformers seek to protect PWSA employees, no matter the cost to the public.
All this said, had pols respected the law and allowed the PWSA to operate independently in the first place, there would be no need for adding more layers of political bureaucracy under the guise of protecting the PWSA from pols.
“In efforts to soar above our nature, we invariably fall below it,” once wrote Edgar Allan Poe. “Blue ribbon” PWSA “reformers” certainly resemble that remark.
Colin McNickle is a senior fellow and media specialist at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
