A sports business consulting firm tells the Post-Gazette that the 10-year extension of PNC Bank’s naming rights deal for the Pittsburgh Pirates’ North Shore ballpark probably will bring the Buccos “multiple millions” of dollars annually.
Marc Ganis says the money should be “significantly higher” than what the Pirates took in under the first 20-year, $30 million agreement that led to “PNC Park.”
Neither PNC nor the Pirates are saying what the new deal is worth.
But while Ganis notes the old deal “barely paid for two minimum-wage players on their roster over the last two decades,” he says that one would hope the new agreement “might pay for a free agent or two or a couple of arbitration-eligible players.”
Yes, but …
Considering how majority public funding of the new baseball park was sold to the public as the best way to return the Pirates to their World Series glory days …
And considering how that has yet to happen …
And considering how that doesn’t look as if it will happen anytime soon …
Who could reasonably argue with the assessment that at least some of those new “multiple millions” of dollars annually should be returned to taxpayers as compensation for being baited and switched (in more ways than one) in The Great Stadia Debate of the 1990s?
Speaking of being taken to the cleaners (ahem), the City of Pittsburgh could be in line for as much as $355 million in the federal government’s $1.9 trillion “Covid-relief legislation” (that, by the way, is short on bona fide pandemic relief but very long on turning the United States into a permanent welfare state).
The payout very well could stave off mass layoffs of critical public servants, proponents argue.
Yes, but …
As Eric Montarti, the Allegheny Institute’s research director, and Jake Haulk, the think tank’s president-emeritus, note (in Policy Brief Vol. 21, No. 10):
“A relief package of over $300 million would represent more than half of (the city’s) recent years’ budgets. If awarded—and permitted to be used for revenue replacement unlike the CARES Act—that will likely take the focus off of what city government can do to save taxpayer dollars.”
You’ll recall that Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto, while saying a number of belt-tightening measures have been implemented over the past year, thus far has not laid off any city employees.
That said, hundreds of city workers could be laid off come summer should federal bailout dollars not come, Peduto has said.
But the prospect of that bailout appears to have only served as an enabler of imprudent governance — to preserve an unsustainable employee count.
And that spendthrift nature will continue if Pittsburgh sees the feds bail out more than half of its annual budget.
Peduto undoubtedly will be hailed in some quarters for “preserving jobs.” (And how convenient, this being a mayoral election year.) But it is far more likely that this latest sad episode of “government beneficence” will only serve to preserve bloat.
Taxpayers deserve better.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
