Colin McNickle At Large

More BA subsidies? And the ‘jock tax’ struck

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A large contingent of Pittsburgh-area community leaders and businesses, led by the Allegheny County Airport Authority and VisitPittsburgh, the region’s tourism-promotion arm, will head to London next week.

It’s hoping to convince British Airways (BA) to increase its now four-times-weekly, publicly subsidized flights between Pittsburgh International (PIT) and London’s Heathrow Airport. BA is receiving $3 million in taxpayer dollars over two years to fly here; the second half of that “juicer,” delayed by a pandemic-induced flight suspension, is to be paid this year.

The junket will cost upwards of $200,000. Officials say that’s for travel, leased space and a reception sponsored by PIT and VisitPittsburgh for the Brits. All others are paying their own way, the Post-Gazette reports. Supposedly.

“The focus of a trip will be a series of roundtable discussions on Thursday, Oct. 6, to talk about the region’s business climate and to ‘highlight opportunities in Pittsburgh’’ to a British audience,” Airport Authority CEO Christina Cassotis told the P-G.

That could be a tall order, if not a tall tale, given Greater Pittsburgh’s continuing population funk, its laggard economic growth and still quite-depressed international travel at PIT — despite lots of rah-rah-sis-boom-bah-ing.

Nonetheless, Cassotis tells the P-G she’s hoping the local delegates can convince their overseas audience that the region can support additional international service and destinations beyond London.

“The purpose is to demonstrate that we have a great business and leisure market,” she said.

Which should negate the “need” for any further subsidies, right?

When is a “facility fee” a tax, and an unconstitutional tax at that? When a court decrees it as such.

That’s the situation the City of Pittsburgh finds itself in after an Allegheny County Common Pleas judge last week ruled that Pittsburgh’s “Non-Resident Sports Facility Usage Fee” (the so-called “jock tax”) indeed is a tax by any other name – a tax that violates the Pennsylvania Constitution’s Uniformity Clause.

That is, “All taxes shall be uniform, upon the same class of subjects, within the territorial limits of the authority levying the tax, and shall be levied and collected under general laws.”

We’ve referenced this clause – Article VIII, Section 1 — many times recently in regards to the county’s broken property tax assessment system.

The jock tax targets visiting professional athletes, a number of which and their respective baseball, hockey and football players’ unions, filed a lawsuit against the city.

Judge Christine Ward found the “fee” discriminatory in two ways – by taxing non-residents differently than residents and by establishing discriminatory tax rates against people in the same occupation,” the P-G reports.

That is, as the Tribune-Review explained:

“Athletes who live in Pittsburgh paid a 1% assessment, while athletes who live elsewhere were charged a 3% assessment on their personal income earned while in Pittsburgh.

“The fee was assessed differently for the different leagues — with NFL players paying based on what are called their “duty days” in Pittsburgh, including games and practices; and MLB and NHL players paying based on dividing the total number of games played in Pittsburgh by the total games played.”

The city has been enjoined from further collecting the tax.

As the P-G reported it, “The city tried to argue that, even if the fee was a tax, it would be permissible because residents and non-residents essentially paid the same rate. Rather than a 3 percent facility fee, Pittsburgh residents pay 2 percent of their income tax to city schools and a 1 percent statutory tax on income.”

But Judge Ward would not buy it. The school tax is imposed by and paid to the schools while the facility fee is paid into the city’s general fund, she said.

“There is no permissible or rational basis for an unequal application of tax rates across residents and nonresidents, and unequal application of tax rates across the same profession,” Judge Ward wrote.

Do expect the city to appeal the ruling. Do expect its attorneys to further rationalize why it meets constitutional muster. And, sadly, do expect appellate courts to attempt to rule that the state Constitution doesn’t say what it means and doesn’t mean what it says.

Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).

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Colin McNickle
Colin McNickle

Colin received his B.G.S. from Ohio University. The 40-year journalism veteran joined the Institute in October 2016. That followed a 22-year career with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, 18 as director of editorial pages for Trib Total Media. Prior that, Colin had a long and varied career in media — from radio, newspapers and magazines, to United Press International and The Associated Press.

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