The Pittsburgh Public Schools (PPS) board is expected to restart public discussions next week about a shelved facilities plan that would drastically, and necessarily, reorder the district’s bricks-and-mortar footprint, the Post-Gazette reports.
A vote on a completed plan was deep-sixed last year, the product of a fetid combination of politics and public policy paralysis.
Yes, the issue is contentious and full of heart-string pulling. But the simple fact of the matter remains that PPS has too many buildings for too few students (and a student census likely to decline even further).
Inaction – better referred to as stupid is as stupid does — will mean insolvency for a district with not only serious physical plant issues but those critically academic as well.
The same Post-Gazette is editorializing anew about the need for regionalizing governance in Western Pennsylvania. It says “fragmented governance,” along with a badly broken property assessment system, “are pushing local taxes higher.”
We ‘ll wholeheartedly agree with the latter. But to yet again claim the former indicates a serious case of addlepatedness of the bemused, befuddled and befogged.
This scrivener and this think tank long have been point-of-ordering the elitists’ push for “regionalism in governance” – once monikered as “metropolitanism” – for decades. For its persistent advocates, self-appointed intelligentia-ists, can’t see the reality for all their brace-snapping.
As I’ve referenced him many times over the years, noted urban researcher Sam Staley long ago found that regional government likely exacerbates the problems it is intended to solve.
“Although there are legitimate concerns about lack of cooperation among local governments, particularly on large public projects such as road and sewer systems, a more consolidated structure probably would decrease the ability of local governments to provide public goods efficiently and cost-effectively,” he said three decades ago.
Staley found that attempts to consolidate governmental authority “imply that public goods and services are handled best by a single comprehensive organization. Experiences with regional attempts to solve local problems have confirmed the worst fears of opponents about the excesses of monopoly government.”
Staley suggested the exact opposite of regionalism.
“The solution is more likely to be found in a competitive, decentralized governmental system,” he said. “Instead of undermining the diverse interests that make up metropolitan America, urban policy should free political markets to ensure that the desires of local residents are expressed fully in the policy-making process and the private sector is given the widest possible latitude to provide needed goods and services.”
And that means more local governance, not less — and privatization. Which, of course, is anathema to many politicians who, in many areas, owe their political livelihoods (if not their hardihood) to those who benefit most from monopoly, centralized government — labor unions, which always raise the cost of government.
As Jake Haulk, president-emeritus of the Allegheny Institute, reminds:
“Getting control of spending is the best answer. But in a region controlled largely by public-sector unions and the voters who think that public unions are part of the natural order, the odds of meaningful change are virtually nonexistent.
“Economic forces will eventually solve the problem,” the Ph.D. economist says. “But with state and federal dollars aiding and abetting the union control, not much will change other than the continuation of the slide.”
The bottom line: Costs associated with the public sector “are likely to soar if a more consolidated local government structure is implemented,” Staley found. “The reasons are fairly straightforward and follow directly from a realistic assessment of the way government actually operates,” versus the way government operatives say it can be run “better,” if only given the chance.
“When bureaucrats and politicians are removed from close, day-to-day contact with citizens, the incentive to spend increases and the stimulus to reduce costs decreases,” Staley noted.
That yet another generation of public policy commentators and opinion makers are being blindly led down the supposedly primrose path of “regionalism” is not becoming at all, neither to the “leaders” nor to those once again happily hopping along that road to public policy perdition.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
