What follows will come across as “harsh” to some. But as a matter of sound public policy, it must be said.
First National Bank Corp (FNB) of Pittsburgh has announced that it is donating $1 million to the Pittsburgh Promise scholarship fund, that demonstrably low-academic-rigor scholarship. All a Pittsburgh Public Schools (PPS) student needs to receive the scholarship is a C average.
FNB will reward five PPS seniors annually and, as the Tribune-Review reports it, they “will have the chance to pursue mentoring and professional relationships with company leaders while working toward their post-secondary degrees.”
This is same FNB taking $10 million in public money to help it build a 26-story skyscraper on the old Civic Arena tract. Will that “mentoring” include tutorials for how yet another generation of business “leaders” can shake down taxpayers?
Make no mistake, FNB is a very profitable outfit. And just last year, it spent just under half-a-billion dollars to buy a Baltimore banking company, Howard Bank.
Yet FNB has repeatedly insisted that the new $240 million Pittsburgh tower could not be built without taxpayer money. Simply put, if it couldn’t, it shouldn’t be built.
And, considering money is fungible, it’s hardly farfetched to suggest that taxpayers also could be paying for FNB’s $1 million donation to PPS, right?
And, by extension, taxpayers also could be helping to pay for that shake-down-the-taxpayer “mentoring,” too, right?
As we’ve noted many times before regarding FNB – and with PNC before — the bottom line here is that it remains ethically and morally wrong for taxpayers to be subsidizing a project for a very wealthy banking giant that clearly has the wherewithal to pay for itself.
And, again, is this the kind of “mentoring” we can expect to see from FNB for its Pittsburgh Promise scholarship recipients?
Well?
Is this a “harsh” line of inquiry? You bet it is. As it must be.
Colin McNickle is communications and marking director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
