It’s yet another remarkable pay package for Christina Cassotis, CEO of the Allegheny County Airport Authority. But, and yet again, it comes with serious questions about her performance.
As the Post-Gazette reports it, Cassotis last week “agreed to a two-year contract extension to stay in Pittsburgh through at least January 2030. Additionally, she received a bonus worth $318,000 — 50 percent of her 2025 base salary of $636,002.”
Per the P-G, “Airport Authority board Chair David Minnotte explained in a statement that Ms. Cassotis’ bonus rewards her work in 2025, and the board ‘rebalanced compensation toward performance and retention incentives rather than compounding base salary growth going forward.’”
Now, her salary will automatically increase by 1 percent annually through 2030. But her annual retention bonus will increase from $60,000 to $100,000.
No matter how the total money is shifted around, that’s a lot of money — by any accounting.
For a new and dubious check-in terminal at Pittsburgh International Airport (PIT) that came in 22.3 percent over budget at $1.7 billion. It’s a terminal project for which even at least one former airline official criticizes as overkill.
That ballooned cost, by the way, has been rationalized by an oft-quoted industry consultant as something akin to the norm. Perhaps therein lies the problem.
And costs continue to rise with board approval just last week of another $1 million for additional consulting services at the terminal that opened in November.
It’s also a lot of money for continuing subsidies, many using public dollars, to “incentivize” airlines to fly into PIT with grand promises of great returns to the local economy but with no verifiable accounting of said claims.
Cassotis has done a great job of exporting dollars abroad, keeps reminding Jake Haulk, president-emeritus of the Allegheny Institute. But there has been no offered documentation of anything reciprocal, only regurgitated economic impact studies that are badly flawed.
It’s been that way with international flights to England, Iceland and we fully expect the same non-reporting results with new subsidized flights to Ireland bowing this year.
And then there are those pesky passenger numbers. While the P-G calls 2025’s 9.84 million passengers “a banner year,” it was 100,000 fewer passengers than 2024’s 9.94 passenger figure.
Is that metric, alone or in conjunction with others we’ve noted, worthy of such repeated salary increases and bonuses?
We continue to think not.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
