The remaining public debt on Pittsburgh’s old Civic Arena will be retired at the end of 2018, the Post-Gazette reports. That will be more than six years after its demolition was completed in March 2012.
Certainly it would be considered a better public policy to not have the public indebted long after such edifices are razed, would it not?
After all, few sane or rational people tear down their home before their mortgage is retired. Neither do we junk our cars, SUVs or trucks before any bank note is paid off.
Unless, on both counts, very poor borrowing/lending decisions were made to begin with.
Why, then, should we allow public officials to use our tax dollars to be encumbered for public buildings that will be demolished for yet another public building that also drains the public kitty?
Simply put, we should not.
As a curious aside, a former Allegheny County commissioner who presided over many improvements to the Igloo (whence the lingering indebtedness arose), told the PG he’ll be happy to see the last of the Civic Arena debt retired.
“I’ll probably feel the same way as when I pay my house off,” Bob Cranmer said. Of course, it’s not a parallel analogy; his house most likely still will be standing when he burns his note.
An ingenious, if not counterintuitive, highway interchange design is up and running in Washington County. It’s known as a Diverging Diamond Interchange, which sends motorists to the left side of each respective approach to eliminate the need to cross oncoming traffic.
The South Strabane Township interchange connects Pennsylvania 19 with Interstate 70. It’s one of only 73 such configurations in the United States and is said to be the first in the Keystone State.
According to early statistics, it’s working like a charm – moving traffic more easily through a once very congested area and, thus far, with fewer accidents.
That sounds like a pretty good public transportation policy. As does the region’s growing experimentation with European-style roundabouts, which eliminate stopped traffic and, thus, the needs for stop signs and/or traffic lights.
The Post-Gazette reports that of the myriad options being considered by the Allegheny County Airport Authority to right-size Pittsburgh International Airport, one involves no longer using the landside terminal.
That’s the terminal first entered by passengers and where ticketing, baggage-check and security-check operations now take place.
Such a move also would, apparently, mean mothballing the subway system used to transport passengers and flight crews to the airside terminal from which planes depart.
Landside terminal functions could either be transferred to empty departure wings of the airside terminal or a new facility to handle those functions, the newspaper reports.
There’s some talk of using the old landslide terminal for office space for companies that often use the airport.
It at least sounds as if the Airport Authority is attempting to respond to the marketplace. That said, its continuing moves to subsidize airlines to fly into Pittsburgh are anathema to real markets. And such perversions – called “pump priming” by government economic development gurus — are destined for failure.
The Guffaw of the Month (thus far) comes from a spokeswoman for the majority leader of the Pennsylvania Senate, on the commonwealth’s continuing budget crisis.
The Senate, of course, has passed a budget full of onerous tax increases. Spokeswoman Jennifer Kocher told PennsylvaniaWatchdog.org that taxes have to be increased because there are no places to cut the budget.
“We have shaken out the couch cushions … and we have exhausted all of the options,” she said, adding “The cost of doing nothing will be fatal to Pennsylvania and its finances.”
Never mind, for starters, that the Senate and House, the latter of which continues (at least publicly) to oppose the Senate tax hikes, are sitting on multimillion-dollar slush funds to ensure their continuing operations.
But overall spending must be cut. It is the raising of taxes that will be fatal to Pennsylvania. States tax themselves to mediocrity, if not bankruptcy. States cannot tax themselves to prosperity.
Colin McNickle is a senior fellow and media specialist at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
