Colin McNickle At Large

Peduto’s epiphany & swine of the Susquehanna

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Perhaps Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto should consider it an object lesson:

The customer-owned Pittsburgh Allegheny County Thermal, better known as PACT, is considering selling its long-in-the-tooth Downtown thermal heating system to a private energy company.

As KDKA Radio reports it, “the more than 100-year-old system of underground pipes and boilers for heating more than 50 buildings is falling apart.”

As Mayor Bill Peduto told the station, “It’s an efficient model. It simply was not invested in for decades and it’s gotten to the point where it can’t even be repaired.”

Building owners are expected to make a final decision sometime this spring.

The radio report also notes how Allegheny County has decided to pull out of PACT and build its own system for county-owned buildings.

But in something of a philosophical epiphany for Peduto, he favors the city remaining in PACT but selling the system to Clearway Energy Group of California.

Well, well, well.

Given the mayor’s newfound appreciation of the private sector providing such a service, he might want to reconsider his insistence that the moribund Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority remain in “public” ownership. And he also might want to reconsider decades-old intransigence to privatizing garbage service.

Oh, the possibilities are almost too numerous to count.

Spotlight PA reports that the Pennsylvania Legislature is perverting an obscure immunity protection to shield from public view suspect spending.

Indeed, legislators enjoy something called “legislative privilege,” a state constitutional provision that protects lawmakers’ ability to speak and debate without retribution.

But the reporting consortium says legislators have been stretching that privilege to hide “information about (on) whom they and their staff spent money to meet with, and the purpose of those meetings.”

Such hubris is appalling. The public that’s footing the bill for this nonsense has every right to expect public policy to be carried out transparently.

The Legislature’s refusal to do just that should be treated as confirmation that any money spent in such a fashion is nothing more than another in a long line of unaccountable slush funds.

Those in government so arrogant as to think that they can live high on the taxpayer hog, and then abuse the spirit and the letter of the state Constitution by hiding the hog’s carcass, are swine.

Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director of the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).

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Colin McNickle
Colin McNickle

Colin received his B.G.S. from Ohio University. The 40-year journalism veteran joined the Institute in October 2016. That followed a 22-year career with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, 18 as director of editorial pages for Trib Total Media. Prior that, Colin had a long and varied career in media — from radio, newspapers and magazines, to United Press International and The Associated Press.

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