Soo-prise, soo-prise. Much in the same way that it sprung news of the Midfield Terminal Project on an unsuspecting public a few years ago, the Allegheny County Airport Authority is at it again.
On March 12, it announced a $75 million project to replace parking lot shuttle buses at Pittsburgh International Airport (PIT) with driverless electric shuttles that use magnets embedded in a roadway for guidance.
As the Post-Gazette reported it, there would be no upfront costs to PIT because, “theoretically,” a private partner would put up the $75 million, which the Airport Authority then would pay off over two decades. “Factoring interest and investor returns, the authority would pay about $11 million a year,” the P-G says.
Well, there’s a prudent “investment,” eh? The Airport Authority will pay $220 million for a $75 million project. One that you can bet, after two decades, will “require” a major overhaul or replacement.
Brilliant!
Do remember that Airport Authority officials defended replacing the old landside terminal with a new terminal by noting the now-scrapped train that ran to the airside terminal cost $4.5 million to operate annually.
Oh, and now, all of a sudden, we hear that the old landside terminal somehow, in some form, will be an integral part of something called “PIT Town Center,” described as “a mixed-use, more pedestrian-friendly environment” in which this new autonomous electric shuttle system “reinforces human-scale design to improve safety and reduce conflicts with traditional vehicle traffic.”
And how will this new “PIT Town Center” be financed? Creatively (cough-cough, snort-snort, nod-nod, wink-wink), if the new shuttle system is any indication.
Speaking of public policy jocularity, new Pittsburgh Mayor Corey O’Connor is rapidly learning how much of a mess the prior Gainey administration left him. Such as a nearly $10 million bill to Pittsburgh Water.
And O’Connor keeps finding that the city’s budget deficit is larger than once claimed.
But per one media account, Gainey city budget office honcho Jake Pawlak says that what the O’Connor team calls deficits are instead “philosophical differences” between two mayors about how to fund municipal government.
Whistling past the graveyard never had a more disingenuous euphemism.
We would recommend you don’t try this with your home finances — or you might find yourself in the hoosegow.
The Post-Gazette editorial board has jumped on the bandwagon to claim that former Pittsburgh Penguins owner Fenway Sports Group (FSG) has a responsibility to give the Lower Hill District redevelopment project some of the $800 million profit it made in the sale.
That, because FSG, as with prior owners, failed to live up to expectations while holding exclusive redevelopment rights to the 28-acre former Civic Arena site.
The editorial includes what only can be called a Freudian slip that exposes a tawdry truth:
“As FSG prepares to exit the city, some civic leaders, including members of the Sports & Exhibition Authority board, have suggested that the company should give Pittsburgh a small slice of its $800 million windfall — maybe enough to grease the skids [our emphasis added] on some Lower Hill projects.”
The repeated demands of “stakeholders” in this project to “grease the skids” played no small role in repeatedly making it challenging for two iterations of Penguins’ ownership to execute those redevelopment plans. And do know that use of the word “challenging” is being quite charitable.
And don’t reasonable cynics have every right to wonder whether palms were being greased, too?
Part of the P-G editorial’s headline claims that “FSG has duties to Pittsburgh beyond its spreadsheet.”
But that’s putting the blame before the bureaucracy — the very bureaucracy that gave the Penguins exclusive development rights in the first place, instead of allowing the free marketplace to do a job that would have been long done by now.
Grease excluded, that is.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
