Here we go again:
A valuable piece of public property is about to go on the sales block. But “The State” will go through machination after machination to determine, supposedly, the “best use” for it.
Uh-oh.
At issue is the old Western Penitentiary building and site on Pittsburgh’s North Side. As the Post-Gazette recounts, the state Legislature authorized the sale of the 22-acre tract along the Ohio River.
But don’t expect the logical thing to happen here – the placement of a for-sale sign on the property and the forthright purchase by some buyer.
No, no, no, no. That’s too easy. “The State” has commissioned a more than $343,000 study to determine the property’s “highest and best use.”
Again, as determined by a state-sponsored “study.”
Gee, what could go wrong?
The key point in this latest exercise in “government knows best” is, as the P-G reports a pol as saying, for “The State” to find “the right buyer.”
How about letting the marketplace find the right buyer?
And, of course, there will be nearly two dozen “stakeholder meetings” in which every special interest under the sun will pull this way, then pull that way and attempt to Christmas tree the sale into a cartoonish and sure-to-fail exercise in command economics.
As one commentator on the P-G story put it, and quite adroitly:
“This project is doomed. Way, way too many cooks in the kitchen, and they don’t know whether they want to make soup or a casserole.
“The better approach would be to put it on the market, define the potential buyers, and then sort through the offers – you know, how things normally are sold – but no, that wouldn’t provide sufficient opportunities for politicians” – and, we add, their legion of acolytes – “to gain leverage on the process.”
The writer hits the nail perfectly on the head.
Rest assured, we’ll be monitoring the cluster cluck to come. But don’t be at all surprised when the process to sell this old prison and site imprisons all common sense and, quite likely, not only true public purpose but the public purse.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
