At the beginning of the year we blogged about the City of Scranton’s sale of its sewer system and how it faced decisions on what to do with the proceeds.  It is somewhat apropos to Pittsburgh since once upon a time (1995) Pittsburgh spun its water system off to an authority and with recent issues with said authority and the water system there has been a lot of chatter on restructuring the authority and the role privatization may or may not play (see here, here, here, here, and here).

So Scranton’s Council is debating not only how to spend the proceeds of the sewer sale, now there is discussion on how to present the ideas to the public of what to do with the proceeds and the timing of that discussion.  According to the article, the City already paid off some debt, and the discussion over whether debt or pensions is the better target may hinge on “anticipated future results” may depend on the modeling of scenarios by the City on what could happen with pensions, but it is worth noting that Scranton can’t reform the nature of its pension benefits, that falls to the General Assembly.

So while one Council member said “If we put $30 million in the pension fund and tomorrow a war starts or something happens and the market crashes, we’ve lost whatever percentage of that money. If we pay off more debt, once it’s paid off, it’s paid off” that is true but also hinges on present or future Councils and administrations not piling up debt again, which itself is a hard thing to accomplish given the need to upkeep infrastructure and not being able to do that solely through recurring revenues.