The National Football League (NFL) needs to get its head out of its tight end. So to speak. And VisitPittsburgh needs to remember who slathers that thick layer of butter on its bread.
According to various media reports, the NFL and the city’s tourism agency hosted a private townhall meeting on the league and city’s plans for this coming spring’s NFL Draft in Pittsburgh.
We trust you readily caught the oxymoron above – a “private townhall meeting.” The public was not invited. Neither was the media, the public’s eyes and ears. Heck, even some public officials didn’t make the cut.
And we also would remind that this April’s very public private NFL workforce development event – which is exactly what this is – is supported by millions of taxpayer dollars and services. That would be at least $13 million at last count.
As the Tribune-Review reported it:
“Hosting the meeting with select residents and business owners were NFL officials, the Pittsburgh Steelers and Visit Pittsburgh. … They said the town hall would provide a planning update and a question-and-answer session.”
But that information only came out when word of the secret meeting leaked. (The Trib reports the media also were barred from an in-person “How to Do Business with League Partners” NFL workshop.)
“Officials provided no specifics about the town hall, such as who was invited, how many and how they were selected,” the Trib reported.
The Trib reports VisitPittsburgh head Jerad Bachar defended the hush-hush meeting, saying it was closed to reporters because some people may be too “shy” to ask questions in front of the press.
“We want to make sure everybody has the opportunity to ask questions,” Bachar said.
But as a fictional Izzy Kabizzy from the “Sahside” might retort: “Sorry, pallie, that ain’t how we conduct the public business ‘round these parts.”
Bachar should know better, especially considering that his organization and its taxpayer bar bellying make Norm Petersen of “Cheers” fame look like a piker.
This kind of behavior from this public official, and other public officials who participated, is a giant bird flip to taxpayers whose pockets are being picked to help pay the way of the very rich NFL.
With the effrontery of a person worthy of such a pompous title, Belynda Gardner, senior director of development inclusion for the NFL, said the league wanted the private, closed-door session “to be an authentic space where people can ask questions.”
Sorry, Ms. Gardner, but the only “authentic space” in which any tax-subsidized event involving an already heavily taxpayer-subsidized NFL and its franchise should be discussed is in a space wide open to the public and to the media.
Gardner also said plans could change based on the closed-door conversations. Gee, when will any plan changes be made public? In a follow-up “private townhall meeting”?
Oh, by the way, as the Trib also reports, local clown show ringmasters (our term, not the Trib’s) say it’s “too early to offer precise attendance predictions, economic impact estimates or guesses on how much it will cost the city to pay for public safety overtime” for the draft.
That’s not what these cluster-cluckers said when they were selling the media and the public on all the supposed manifest benefits of hosting the NFL Draft.
At least some in the media are starting to throw a flag on this bum’s rush against transparency and, yes, even basic honesty. The hubris of these latest developments smells like a discarded fish sammich left in the sun on a sweltering day in the Strip District.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org)
