Taxpayers fed-up with bailouts and expansion in government spending expressed their outrage at “tea parties” yesterday. They happened in Pittsburgh and in cities and towns across Pennsylvania and the nation.
It is too bad the one here could not have been held the day before when the Governor appeared to dole out $28 million in funds from the Redevelopment Assistance Capital Budget (RACP) to projects in Allegheny County. Consider that much of the money is going to bail out bad decision-making, much of it by government planners from generations past.
Consider the money going to the East Liberty section of the City, where planners redeveloped the neighborhood into a pedestrian style setting and rerouted traffic patterns. The neighborhood crumbled and saw disinvestment, and now is being remade with the help of $2 million for traffic improvements and $4 million for a parking garage in a new development in close proximity.
Or how about the Port Authority’s new mindset (with the permission of state legislation) to encourage walkable development near its trolley stops? Of course that will require getting rid of swaths of parking spaces, so the state will pay $4 million to encourage retail and residential development (there are already special tax guidelines for developments that may occur at these sites) even though population decreases in proximity to the stops are greater than the population losses in the communities housing stops.
We could go on: there’s money for the Hill District, where the decision to place the Civic Arena on the Lower Hill in the 1960s had similar disastrous effects as in East Liberty; money for cultural attractions, several of which get assistance from the Regional Asset District; and money for a redevelopment of a retail store into a convention center in order to allow the old convention center to become office space.
Why do the top-down planners who conjure up these visions always get a “mulligan” when their best-laid plans don’t work? The public ought to be as outraged over the government’s intrusion into propping up bad public decision-making as they are with the corporate bailouts of late. The RACP money is neither free nor without requirement to be paid back at some date.
