Come Monday, the Pittsburgh Penguins will “lose the rights to surface parking – and the revenue it generates – to the [Pittsburgh-Allegheny County] Sports & Exhibition Authority (SEA) and the Pittsburgh Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA),” the Post-Gazette reports.
But consider it a distinction without a difference:
An arm of the same firm that manages PPG Paints Arena, the Penguins’ heavily taxpayer financed hockey arena, is being tapped to run the lots for the SEA and URA.
That’s apparently until the lots can be “developed” – a process that has dragged on for more than a decade.
Such bureaucratic incestuousness — as fungible as is money — should have no place in sound public policy.
Speaking of incestuous bureaucracies, the P-G also reports that the “Columbus, Ohio, firm tasked with developing the land between PNC Park and Acrisure Stadium on the North Shore will get more time to craft a game plan for the last of the parcels still to be transformed.”
The Pittsburgh Stadium Authority has given Continental Real Estate Companies three more years, until Dec. 31, 2027, to develop Gold Lot 2, long a surface parking lot.
Continental’s rights to develop the parcel had been set to expire by Dec. 31, 2024.
Do remember that the Pittsburgh Pirates and Steelers were, in a sweetheart deal, handed development rights to the tract between the sports stadiums.
While some tout that what thus far has been developed on the 28-acre site as proof positive that cozy deals and government command economics work, what once languished as a parking lot wasteland in the days of the old Three Rivers Stadium has been turned into an eyesore of uninteresting cookie-cutter architectural mumbo-jumbo.
As with the old Civic Arena site, development rights to the North Shore properties should have gone out to bids – bids unencumbered and/or tethered by the usual suspects plying their special interest trade.
As an aside, having just completed more than 13,000 miles of travels in the past month – not only through much of Europe but also in the Greater Tampa, Fla., area – there is much new architecture (melded with and complimenting the old), from which Pittsburgh planners could learn much.
But that will only occur in a climate in which the command economists walking around with eyes wide shut are shut down and the public purse from which developers continually seek taxpayer alms is snapped shut.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
