It once was written that the cause of laughter is simply the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and a real object.
By that standard, thinking people are laughing uproariously at the protestations of two Allegheny pols over a proposal to add badly needed checks and balances to the board of the Allegheny County Airport Authority.
Sans that change, however, any laughs stand to turn to gasps.
House Speaker Mike Turzai has proffered legislation that would expand the Airport Authority board from nine to 13 members. Four of the appointments would be split between the Legislature’s respective caucuses and a fifth would be made by the governor.
That means the Allegheny County chief executive, who now appoints all nine board members, would have eight appointments.
The proposal comes on the heels of some significant economic fails at the Findlay Township airport – namely several publicly subsidized airline flops and embarrassing board behavior – and as a $1 billion-plus reconfiguration of Pittsburgh International Airport commences.
The speaker’s rationale is as simple as it is fundamental – “It’s good government. It’s checks and balances,” he told the Post-Gazette.
Better governance and a bolus of independent oversight – a wakeup call — is exactly what the Airport Authority could use. To wit, at least three current board members allowed themselves to become conflicted by investing in an airline, now failed, that received public subsidies. The board rationalized that there was no conflict because it gave the authority’s CEO plenary power to dole up subsidies.
A conflict of interest by proxy is no less a conflict of interest. Divesting your own board of oversight in an area in which oversight is critical is lousy public policy, if not nonfeasance.
And given the failures of subsidized OneJet and WOW Air, incentivizing Qatar Airways’ failure to meet cargo quotas and myriad continuing market perversions, questions of oversight and due diligence loom large.
Furthermore, considering the state dollars or state-sanctioned dollars (public money) that go toward the agency, state participation, a la the Port Authority of Allegheny County, hardly represents outlier oversight.
Nonetheless, those seeking to preserve such machinations see some sort of conspiracy theory. State Sen. Wayne Fontana of Brookline, the Democrats’ caucus chairman, says he thinks the current board is “doing a great job as it is.”
More’s the pity.
Added Fontana, “The timing of this, all of the sudden there’s a focus on the Airport Authority and there’s a big project. You have to wonder. Connect the dots.”
The dots of an authority with a dubious track record of conflict and shedding oversight as it is about to embark on a billion-dollar-plus project, Mr. Fontana?
Turzai tells the P-G he’s open to alternatives. As the newspaper characterizes it, “such as a nine-member board with two of the appointees coming from the state.”
But whether it’s a reconfigured nine-member board or an expanded 13-member board, there can be no doubt that the existing Allegheny County Airport Authority is dysfunction incarnate.
Heading into Pittsburgh International’s mega overhaul with the current governance would be a disaster in the making. And that’s no laughing matter.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
