Visit Pittsburgh and the hotel owners will be pitching a proposed increase in the hotel occupancy tax to the Legislature and then to the County for approval. The claim by the VisitPittsburgh promotion people is that more money is needed to attract conventions and other large events to the Pittsburgh.
How interesting. Less than 20 years ago we were told that the increased hotel tax for Allegheny County passed by the Legislature would help build a magnificent new convention center which would magically and massively boost the number of visitors to the City. Hotels would need to be built to accommodate the influx and no public money would be necessary for the construction. Now we have a bunch of new hotels but apparently the number of visitors has not materialized as hoped.
The VisitPittsburgh group wants to empire build by creating a Sports Commission to attract athletic events, including perhaps the Super Bowl. Let’s see. Pittsburgh has major league baseball, football, hockey, (soccer sometimes), along with college football, baseball and basketball. How many sporting events can one community handle?
As usual the proponents look to other cities and say Pittsburgh is not doing enough and the combined sales and hotel tax here is lower than 15 other areas. Perhaps an examination of which cities are higher in combined tax is in order. Will we find they are no better at hosting sporting and other visitor related events than Pittsburgh? The data will tell us.
Is it ‘rain’ — or something else?
January 16, 2026