The 2026 NFL Draft will be held in Pittsburgh, of course. But weeks after the announcement, there remain two nagging questions:
First, why has the Steelers’ and local governments’ bid never been made public?
And second, how much public money has been pledged to host this circus for the barons of the professional gridiron?
Simply put, if any public services and/or monetary assistance has been pledged, the bid automatically should be a public document.
And we don’t want to hear that the bid somehow is “proprietary.” The draft in two years has been awarded. The bid has been accepted. City, county, state and franchise officials have a responsibility to make that bid public.
Period.
A short half-hour away from Pittsburgh, Weirton and West Virginia officials are all a-ga-ga over word that the Cleveland-Cliffs steel company will, as the Post-Gazette reports it, “transform a massive warehouse in Weirton into a hub for electrical transformers that will help modernize the country’s electric grid and save jobs in an industrial town that learned months ago the last vestige of its steel industry was shutting down.
“The new plant, expected to come online in the first half of 2026, will employ 600 United Steelworkers-represented workers who lost their jobs when Cleveland-Cliffs shuttered its tinplate mill there in April. The state of West Virginia is footing a third of the $150 million cost to transform the plant through a forgivable loan.”
Whoa! And hold the phone!
A Cleveland-Cliffs official and those with the United Steelworkers Union more than intimate that there is a massive demand for this new transformer facility because of the explosion in artificial intelligence electronics.
We’re told the plant’s success is a veritable long-term slam dunk. Jobs saved! The economy bolstered! The Northern Panhandle’s economic future assured!
Well, if that’s the case, why are taxpayers being tapped for millions of dollars in loans that, in all probability, never will be paid back?
The Cleveland-Cliffs deal comes about a year-and-a-half after the Mountain State committed hundreds of millions of dollars in public money – in the form of grants and performance-based subsidies – to another company to build a dubious “iron-air” battery plant on the old Weirton Steel site.
While “iron-air” batteries can cost 1/10 the amount of lithium batteries and are said to have a reduced fire hazard, we say “dubious” because of their relative inefficiency (less than 50 percent, by one calculation), excessive weight (they can be used only in stationary applications) and are slow to charge.
But, again, if West Virginia and Form Energy officials’ claims that “iron-air” batteries will become the be-all and end-all of “green energy” storage, why should taxpayers be pickpocketed for hundreds of millions of dollars in financial backstopping?
They should not be.
By the way, West Virginia government is licking its very expensive wounds these days after a Wall Street Journal expose on what has all the makings of a taxpayer-financed boondoggle.
The story cast doubt on the veracity of a developer who was, with much fanfare, promised a $50 million forgivable taxpayer loan to convert an old coal-fired electric plan into a “green” marvel of producing hydrogen and championing carbon sequestration.
The only problem is that there’s virtually no replicable proof that this developer’s technology works. And a former high-level employee has alleged in a federal lawsuit that the developer misrepresented the supposed technological achievement to defraud the government to secure financing.
Stay tuned. But it’s the kind of alleged shenanigans that all to often come to light when government tries to enact an industrial policy and command the economy — but have no expertise to even attempt so and seldom perform the proper due diligence.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
