On what planet would anyone think it appropriate for a public school district – and no matter that it’s in state receivership and forced to send its middle and secondary students to other school districts to boot – to dole out no-interest loans to employees?
That practice is what a blistering state audit of the Duquesne City School District uncovered.
Loans totaling $41,000 were given to four employees, including the former superintendent. The auditor general says the district treated its general fund as a “piggy bank.”
Eleven of the 22 loans – about $23,000 worth — went to that former district chief. She resigned last week. All of the loans were repaid within the year in which they were taken through payroll deductions on future wages, the audit found.
But that’s no defense of the practice, which was not cleared – and never would have been cleared – by the school board, the district’s receiver or the chief recovery officer. Worse, the loans were structured so as not to be flagged by the district’s independent auditor.
The auditor general says he’s referring the matter to the state Ethics Commission. The district has promised to adopt a formal policy to prohibit the practice and says it will seek interest payments on the loans.
But, again, why and how would anyone – administrators or employees – come to believe that such loans were in any way proper?
“Absurd on its face,” is how the auditor general described the practice. Such loans are “inappropriate at any level,” he said.
Again, that anyone in the Duquesne City School District thought otherwise is a seriously troubling indicator of self-serving “public servants.”
Short takes:
Allegheny County Chief Executive Rich Fitzgerald made a few interesting comments to the Pittsburgh Technology Council this week regarding Greater Pittsburgh’s hush-hush super-secret bid to entice Internet retailing giant Amazon to build a second headquarters locally.
And, no, he didn’t disclose any details of the bid, despite widespread demands to do so.
The first comment was that Amazon’s touted $5 billion investment and creation of 50,000 jobs would roll out over 17 years. That timeline previously had not been revealed. (At least we never heard it before.)
The second was the ACE’s touting of Pittsburgh’s affordable housing prices. A house that goes for, say, $250,000 in Pittsburgh goes for $800,000 in Seattle, where Amazon is based, he said.
But economists note it is Amazon’s dominance of the Seattle market that has played no small role in massively inflating housing prices and rent there.
While “growth” is a great thing – when it’s privately financed, that is — how would Pittsburgh-area leaders deal with the kind of housing-cost crisis playing out in Seattle?
Pittsburgh apparently has had few takers since, four years ago, authorizing advertising on city property, the Tribune-Review reports.
No wonder, considering the city restrictions neutered the definition of “advertising.”
To wit, and all in the name of “aesthetics,” the 2013 legislation authorizing such ads prohibited company logos or brand-specific text. And the city maintains editorial control of the ads.
Why would anyone “advertise” with such government-imposed restrictions?
Four years ago it was predicted such advertising would generate up to $3 million annually, dollars that apparently never materialized. One city official bemoans rules and regulations that have left “money on the table.”
To its credit, the city is about to revisit the matter.
For a city that has struggled for so many years to get its financial act together, three words — one would think.
A new study of the mortality rates in Pennsylvania’s six-highest shale gas-drilling counties – Greene and Washington, locally – suggest “no identifiable impact on death rates … attributable to the introduction of unconventional oil and gas development.”
“In fact, the top Marcellus counties experienced declines in mortality rates in most indices,” a listing of the study’s major findings concludes.
As study author Susan E. Mickley, a health research consultant from Lehigh Valley, stressed, this, of course, does not mean that mortality rates improved because of shale gas drilling.
But it does appear to credibly rebut the contentions of others who have claimed widespread deleterious health effects from the industry.
Colin McNickle is a senior fellow and media specialist at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
