When Sara Innamorato claimed victory in last week’s balloting for Allegheny County Chief Executive (ACE), she made an almost indecipherable remark about what would be her incoming administration’s fealty to organized labor.
No surprise there for the self-described “progressive” who has had an on-again, off-again association with the “social democrat” movement.
But what caught our ears – if we heard correctly through the noise of her boisterous victory party – was that the unions were going to “run” things in an Innamorato administration.
Now, it’s not that the organized labor hasn’t already been doing so in long Democrat-controlled Allegheny County and in the City of Pittsburgh. Union control has become particularly bad in the city’s Gainey mayoral administration.
It sounds as if labor’s county control will be ramped up even further as departing ACE Rich Fitzgerald makes way for Sara Innamorato. Or, if not materially ramped up, at least more in the public’s face.
Of course, none of this bodes well for anything resembling “reform” in an Allegheny County badly in need of it.
Call us cynics but we see little chance for any real and long-overdue changes at the flailing Pittsburgh Regional Transit, the arrogant Airport Authority or for the badly broken property assessment system, to highlight just three of many areas.
In fact, we suspect things will only grow worse in an Innamorato administration that, at least on paper and in stump speeches, appears ready to double-down on what ails county government.
And, frankly, we won’t be surprised at all to see attempts at implementing a union designed and county-directed (and most deleterious) “industrial policy.”
We’ll be happy (and, yes, surprised) to be proven wrong. But we doubt that will happen over the next four years given the loose outline of policy prescriptions that surely will offer the same-old, same-old – if not worse.
Stay tuned. Or, given that Allegheny County residents are more likely to be force-fed a litany of policy prescriptions from a bottle of long-ago and expired boilerplate “progressive” medication, stay tooned.
For the resulting cartoonish caricature of “governance” likely will be most unflattering.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
