BlueSky News, the public relations (i.e. propaganda) arm of the Allegheny County Airport Authority, had nothing but plaudits for the retiring chairman and two other members of the board that oversees Pittsburgh International Airport and the Allegheny County Airport.
The trio “leave behind a model of good governance for aviation industry,” went the subhead on the article.
But we can only imagine more than a few astute observers retorting, “Where’s the air sickness bag when you need it?”
Why? The departing chairman’s 16-year tenure (and 22 years total on the board) featured gross conflicts of interest among its members, the irresponsible granting of vast plenary powers to the authority’s CEO and using multiple millions of public dollars in an attempt to grow passenger numbers through direct airline subsidies.
Or as Jake Haulk, president-emeritus of the Allegheny Institute, put it:
“What a travesty of performance,” he says. “The dollars spent to achieve the very modest passenger gains from a depressed level is disgraceful.”
Those very same subsidies to foreign airlines are exporting more passenger dollars abroad than importing them into Greater Pittsburgh, federal data suggest. It’s a contention Haulk long has championed.
Haulk, a Ph.D. economist, thinks the new board will continue to be “a rubber stamp for the expensive grandiose plans” of the CEO. And he’s likely right.
To wit, one of the three new Airport Authority board appointees is Devlin Robinson, a Republican state senator from the South Hills. And his tenure likely will be a poster child for the kind of malarkey the authority long has practiced, given that he was said to be instrumental in helping secure a $5.25 million, two-year state subsidy for those direct Pittsburgh-to-Dublin flights on Aer Lingus.
As WPXI-TV reported at the time, “Robinson sees the new Aer Lingus flight at Pittsburgh International Airport as not just another feather in the cap of the … airport or the link to his ancestral homeland. Robinson sees a potentially huge boost to the Pittsburgh-region economy.”
Just as those taxpayer-subsidized British Airways flights did, Senator?
It hasn’t happened. And it likely won’t happen with the Aer Lingus flights. That great sucking sound you hear is money leaving Greater Pittsburgh. And you can bet that if there is any Irish investment here, it will be heavily subsidized, too – to cover up the lie that the Aer Lingus public subsidies somehow were a “prudent investment.”
The Allegheny County Airport Authority board certainly is no model for the kind of “good governance” that BlueSky News paints it to be. And no amount of propaganda can make it so.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
