At long last, Congress has appropriated the millions of dollars desperately required to fix the crumbling system of locks and dams on the Monongahela River. It now will be up to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to allocate the money.
While this is great news, it is long overdue. And it points to a broken bureaucratic process that endangered the free flow of vital commerce on our inland waterways. Witness that the work on the lower Mon was authorized by Congress in 1992 – 26 years ago.
Sound public policy indeed demands due diligence. But that diligence certainly must be performed in a timely manner. Twenty-six years hardly is “timely.”
Word from Pittsburgh’s North Shore is that a tropical lagoon will be incorporated into a 15-acre mixed-used development along the Ohio River off Beaver Avenue, just west of the West End Bridge in the Chateau neighborhood.
The lagoon, sized at 2 acres, is designed for use by swimmers, kayakers and paddleboarders in the summer. It will be converted into an ice-skating rink during the winter. The lagoon/rink will be open to the public for a fee.
But while various media reports tout the developer’s effusive accolades for the coming project, there’s no indication what, if any, taxpayer dollars are expected or have been offered. Past being prologue, one can only imagine there is an extended or expected public financing component.
That said, other than public infrastructure, taxpayers have no business being turned into venture capitalists to underwrite capital costs that the developer alone should bear.
And that said, once upon a time developers were expected to cover the cost of the increased demand their developments placed on the public infrastructure.
Gee, remember the good ol’ days of “impact fees”?
A correspondent chides this scrivener for an op-ed detailing the Allegheny Institute’s argument against instituting a severance tax (on top of the existing impact fee) for the extraction of shale natural gas.
“The gas industry once again wants us to think they (sic) pay us so much just for the privilege of being here in Pennsylvania that we should give them our gas for free,” the writer states in a letter to the Tribune-Review.
“Among their latest efforts to get their raw product for nothing, did they recruit Colin McNickle to write a favorable piece in the Trib?”
There, of course, are two issues here that must be addressed:
First, companies drilling in Pennsylvania certainly don’t “get their raw product for nothing.”
On top of that impact fee, they also must buy the mineral rights from property owners or those who otherwise own those rights. Those owners typically are paid a signing bonus and royalties.
And then there are the hardly incidental costs to comply with myriad government regulations.
There’s nothing “free” about any of that.
Second, this writer was not “recruited” by anyone “to write a favorable opinion piece.” It was based on the scholarly research of this public policy institute, always grounded in sound and fundamental economics.
In other words, the facts — and not the misinformation and innuendo of the letter writer to the Trib.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
