An opinion piece published today addressed what can be done in the Pittsburgh area better. The piece addressed government consolidation: “Another serious problem of Pittsburgh, on the shelf, is the issue of consolidation. The current configuration of Allegheny County, divided still in governmental terms into 130 boroughs, townships and other forms of municipality, is inefficient and an expensive, unjustifiable luxury, not taking advantage of economies of scale…”
The piece goes on to reference the nearly decade old task force that last tackled the subject. The author stated “The various politicians involved — people who act on the basis of their stake in the current, antiquated status quo — showed no interest in the changes proposed and let consolidation drop again with a thud”.
We wrote plenty about that proposed the plan, which was unworkable from the start. First, the study took longer than the Mayor at the time said it would have. It wanted to rush a referendum question on merging the City of Pittsburgh and the County, but left this unwieldy issue: the other 129 municipalities would have remained independent. The City of Pittsburgh would have become an “urban services district” with higher taxes, a proposal deemed unconstitutional by merger proponents. Much of the proposal was based on experience from Louisville, KY, which in 2003 merged with Jefferson County, but had done a lot prior to the merger on services and also had unincorporated territory, something non-existent in Pennsylvania. And the claims of growth in Louisville as a result of the merger were dubious.
