Allegheny County Chief Executive (ACE) Sara Innamorato is defending her proposed 2025 budget and massive (nearly 50 percent) property tax increase by highlighting some of the “core” programs that would have to be cut if County Council refuses to adopt her budget.
But in the process, she has shown how poorly she is setting spending priorities.
To wit, if the council doesn’t pass the Innamorato budget, the $800,000 Allegheny Together Main Street Program will go away. It aids “community planning, facade improvements, public events and other initiatives to help with business districts in communities countywide,” the P-G reports.
But these are tough budget times for Allegheny County. And the bottom line should be that taxpayers have no business underwriting what solely should be a function of private businesses.
Cut!
How many other similar programs pock-mark the county budget?
Cut!
Then there’s a budget line item of $2 million “to attract and keep local businesses investing in clean energy and technology, manufacturing, life sciences. The county says this will help create thousands of jobs and help prepare local residents for growing industries,” the P-G further reports.
Sounds like another crock to us, given how the “green energy revolution” has been so overstated in recent years, not to mention inefficiently expensive.
Cut!
And these are just two of what we have to assume are many, many line items that can and should be excised from the budget, items that even in flush budget times should not have been there to begin with.
As more than one observer has noted, other budget items that Innamorato says would be on the chopping block are “handouts” and not the “core” services for which the ACE says the property tax increase is needed to continue funding.
Some will argue these line items and others are small and insignificant in a county budget of several billion dollars. But they do add up. And it remains incumbent upon the Innamorato administration and County Council to find every dollar that can and should be cut and make the cuts.
That said, Innamorato’s bluster about slashing the county police force and other public amenities falls quite short. As does her contention that Allegheny County can, and must, tax and spend its way to prosperity.
A major part of the real solution to this mess, of course, is for the county to conduct a full property reassessment and then update those assessments on a regular basis. (We long have preferred every three years).
Anti-windfall provisions will prevent massive spikes in those taxes. But those who for far too long have not been paying their fair share will begin to. And those whose property values have declined but who have been paying an unfair share of the burden will see relief.
Back to Innamorato:
“We must invest in our county, in our core services, in our future: it is absolutely essential,” she said last week. That she appears to not know, or is so confused about, what is “core” in county government and what is not more than suggests she’s more than a few remedial lessons short in sound public policy and responsible governance.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
