Tuesday, January 08, 2008
Confusion Reigns at Pittsburgh Today
Right before the holiday rush the Post-Gazette ran an article about a new Regional Indicators Initiative organized by a group called Pittsburgh Today. The purpose of the Initiative, according to its co-chairs—one, the former editor of the Post-Gazette and the other the former U.S. Treasury Secretary—is to get a clearer picture of the region by benchmarking it against 15 other regions. This is not too groundbreaking as benchmarking has been used by the Competitive Pittsburgh Task Force and we have written two reports that benchmark the City of Pittsburgh against four other hub cities.
“Until you know where you are, you can’t really be intelligent about it” were the words of one of the co-chairs.
But does the Pittsburgh Today Initiative bring confusion or clarity?
We’d argue that on first glance it is the former.
The problem is that there seems to be no agreed upon definition of what the Pittsburgh region is. The site points out that the Census defines the metro area as seven counties in Western PA; transportation dollars are targeted at a 10-county area; the Bureau of Economic Analysis takes a broader 19-county conglomeration that spreads throughout PA, Ohio, and West Virginia; and then the Pittsburgh Today group wants to add even more counties to the 19-county area and make it a 22-county region.
Rather than picking one definition, the Initiative uses the various groupings in various places: about half of the 36 current indicators use the 22-county area, 15 use the metro area. The group claims that when it is using one level of measurement for the Pittsburgh region, it is using the exact same level for the benchmark regions. In other words, when the general area of “Economy” is looked at on the indicator of “Job Growth” on the metro area (MSA) base, all of the other benchmark metro regions (MSA) are used as well.
There is a real problem when a group cannot arrive at agreement on a population base to gauge measurements upon. The region is either a 7 county area, then a 22 county area, then smaller, then bigger, and can even vary within general topic area. It would have been far more convincing to settle on one base and keep the comparisons consistent throughout. By not doing so, the picture is never clear and the project looks like an attempt to obfuscate some serious issues in the Pittsburgh region as most Pittsburghers know it.
Add to that there is little in the way of definitive supporting narrative and some of the data, like government finances, are from 2002.
So dear readers, rather than keep the confusion going, we instead make a simple request: go to the Pittsburgh Today website (www.pittsburghtoday.org) and make some comparisons. Is Pittsburgh’s government smaller than Cleveland or Charlotte? Are jobs growing faster here than in Boston or Philadelphia? Are we healthier than Kansas City?
“Until you know where you are, you can’t really be intelligent about it” were the words of one of the co-chairs.
But does the Pittsburgh Today Initiative bring confusion or clarity?
We’d argue that on first glance it is the former.
The problem is that there seems to be no agreed upon definition of what the Pittsburgh region is. The site points out that the Census defines the metro area as seven counties in Western PA; transportation dollars are targeted at a 10-county area; the Bureau of Economic Analysis takes a broader 19-county conglomeration that spreads throughout PA, Ohio, and West Virginia; and then the Pittsburgh Today group wants to add even more counties to the 19-county area and make it a 22-county region.
Rather than picking one definition, the Initiative uses the various groupings in various places: about half of the 36 current indicators use the 22-county area, 15 use the metro area. The group claims that when it is using one level of measurement for the Pittsburgh region, it is using the exact same level for the benchmark regions. In other words, when the general area of “Economy” is looked at on the indicator of “Job Growth” on the metro area (MSA) base, all of the other benchmark metro regions (MSA) are used as well.
There is a real problem when a group cannot arrive at agreement on a population base to gauge measurements upon. The region is either a 7 county area, then a 22 county area, then smaller, then bigger, and can even vary within general topic area. It would have been far more convincing to settle on one base and keep the comparisons consistent throughout. By not doing so, the picture is never clear and the project looks like an attempt to obfuscate some serious issues in the Pittsburgh region as most Pittsburghers know it.
Add to that there is little in the way of definitive supporting narrative and some of the data, like government finances, are from 2002.
So dear readers, rather than keep the confusion going, we instead make a simple request: go to the Pittsburgh Today website (www.pittsburghtoday.org) and make some comparisons. Is Pittsburgh’s government smaller than Cleveland or Charlotte? Are jobs growing faster here than in Boston or Philadelphia? Are we healthier than Kansas City?
