Some things make us laugh at the deception. Others embarrass us for the rank rah-rah-sis-boom-bah-ism.
To wit:
The city-county Sports & Exhibition Authority (SEA) is paying more than $6 million to replace about 22,000 seats that had begun to deteriorate at Acrisure Stadium. And the Tribune-Review says that by 2029, the SEA will replace all of the stadium’s 58,000-plus seats.
The SEA is paying for it all because it owns Acrisure and leases it to the Steelers.
But there’s something a tad different with some of the replacement seats: they’re black, thus randomly breaking up the yellow gold that the original seats had solidly been.
“[W]hen crowds have thinned out for games in recent years, on television the bright seats stood out and made Acrisure appear more empty than it actually was for, say, a Pitt game against a lower-level opponent or in the second half of a lopsided Steelers game,” the Trib reported last week.
We didn’t merely laugh at that one – “appear more empty than it actually was” — we full-throttle snorted. For this is the same optic trick that NASCAR, hit with declining race attendance, has employed for years to make the eye think those seats, ahem, appear more filled than they actually are.
Pure and simple, the tactic is a marketing ploy. And truth in depiction it most certainly is not. It is, by any standard, an immaculate deception.
And we darn near lost our breakfast when reading a Post-Gazette contributed commentary recounting the supposedly fabled 1966 concurring opinion of storied state Supreme Court Justice Michael Musmanno in Conrad v. Pittsburgh.
That case, filed by a citizen’s group, contended that the public financing scheme to be used to pay for Three Rivers Stadium 60 years ago was unconstitutional because it indebted taxpayers without a vote.
And it argued there were far more important, “must-have” things for taxpayers to fund, such as “police, fire, school, sewage disposal and other basic services.”
The court, based on a parsing of case law (that future courts in other cases would discount), rejected that argument.
In his concurrence, Musmanno wrote that just “as man cannot live by bread alone, a city cannot endure on cement, asphalt and pipes alone.” Its objective is not merely to “survive” but to “progress.”
“It would be a sad day indeed if the Pirates should leave Pittsburgh and not return,” Musmanno wrote in part.
“Not to have the gladsome and thrilling Opening Day of the Baseball Season each spring, not to watch the tension-charged race of the home team against the teams from afar, not to be constantly buoyed up with the hope that with every game Pittsburgh may be getting closer to the coveted National League pennant and then go on to the electrifying sensation of the World Series — when for a week, all foreign and domestic troubles and the vexations of the high cost of living are drowned out in the flood of throbbing anticipations — not to have all this would be tragedy indeed in the history and life of Pittsburgh.”
Musmanno laid it on as thick as the animal dung left behind in a three-ring circus. Indeed, Musmanno had a distinguished legal career, including being a judge at the Nuremberg trials. But his Three Rivers Stadium funding concurrence was taxpayer-dismissing cheerleading at its worst.
Never mind that then, or in the 1990s (in which the public was indebted for 30 years even with a resounding “NO!” vote) or in the future, it’s not the responsibility of taxpayers, indirectly or directly, to see to “gladsome and thrilling” opening days, to “constantly buoy up pennant hope” or to power “the electrifying sensation” of being in a World Series.
And the only “tragedy … in the history and life of Pittsburgh” is that taxpayers have been twice snookered into paying for what the Pirates alone should have paid and that the Pirates likely will go for the hattrick when their PNC Park lease expires in a few years.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@allegehnyinstitute.org).
