The chairman of the Allegheny County Airport Authority board of directors made a rather odd statement Friday last as the board rubber-stamped yet another whopping annual bonus for CEO Christina Cassotis.
David Minnotte, in a statement before the vote, not only said Cassotis was most deserving of a $270,000 bonus but also her contractually guaranteed 6 percent raise to $636,002 because, as Minnotte put it:
“We have intentionally sought to get her salary competitive with market-leading airports, and we have achieved that,” he said.
But as the Post-Gazette reminded, Cassotis’ “salary already ranked in the upper echelon for airport executives nationally, above some larger cities. Her compensation was higher than the leaders of the largest airports serving Boston, Atlanta and Dallas as of last year.”
So, wasn’t her salary already “competitive”?
That said, Minnotte says Cassotis’ annual raises will be reduced to 1 percent for 2026 and 2027. But you can bet those questionable bonuses – of 45 percent of her salary — will continue.
Interestingly enough, Minnotte continues to claim that no local taxpayer dollars are involved in the airport’s operations. While the airlines, through fees, indeed cover most of the authority’s budget, local taxpayer dollars certainly DO help fund those operations.
We would remind that the more than $12 million in gambling proceeds that the Airport Authority now receives in perpetuity is public money, some of it generated locally. Parking taxes? Certainly. Rental-car taxes. Why, yes. And taxes and fees paid by the airlines certainly are passed on to customers in their pricing.
Authority officials continue to cite Cassotis’ work on the nearing-completion $1.5 billion Midfield Terminal Project as a major part of the rationale for her latest raise and bonus. They also cite her work to bring new flights to Pittsburgh International Airport.
But, as the Allegheny Institute has frequently documented, those flights are all too often subsidized by taxpayers and offer questionable returns, given that international flights export dollars to foreign economies rather than import them to the domestic local market.
One of our regular correspondents says he continues “to find it remarkable that the answer to bad socialist policies is more socialism.”
That’s in reference to the ongoing debate between the City of Pittsburgh and housing developers.
“In the real world, new housing developments are always more expensive than older housing stock,” he reminds. “What drives down prices is increased supply relative to demand.
“The city’s policies already restrict supply, not just through these inclusionary zones but because the URA, the planning commission, the zoning hearing board and various community group grifters have turned the approval process into a red tape machine that takes years to navigate.
“Their answer is more restrictions and more red tape,” our correspondent notes. “That doesn’t sound like the definition of making housing more affordable or inclusive.”
The writer reminds that short-term tax abatements graduated to long-term “and now they need to provide outright grants to get anything built.”
“The answer (in their minds) is to wave around ever-increasing bags of taxpayer money in the form of bribes (subsidies), which drives up the tax burden for everybody else.
“All the while these elected officials shamelessly show up with bags of taxpayer money and groundbreaking shovels to crow about how they, themselves, are creating economic development.”
Continues our correspondent:
“Is it just me, or is anybody else noticing a pattern here? The reality is that their policies are impeding prosperity by raising development costs and restricting supply, while sticking the existing taxpayers with the bill.
“All of this makes living in the city less affordable for the average person, who will ultimately pick up the tab for making these politicians look good when they hand out bags of money.”
The writer, of course, is spot-on. But legacy-seeking pols only create large, messy and expensive spots – the pox marks of their very poor public policy prescriptions.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
