Consider it a proposed public policy solution that is no solution at all and most assuredly will create more problems than it supposedly will “solve.”
Reports the Post-Gazette:
“With Downtown [Pittsburgh] reeling from high office vacancies and plunging real estate values, draft legislation before the state Legislature would allow the city to impose new taxes or fees or divert revenue from existing taxes to help with revitalization efforts.”
Gee, what could go wrong?
Among the particulars in the draft bill:
Money raised, either through unspecified taxes or fees, “could be used to help fund the conversion of faltering office buildings to residential or to fill ground-floor or lower-level commercial spaces,” the P-G reports.
But that’s certainly not taxpayers’ responsibility. And as we’ve repeatedly said, shaking down taxpayers to cover the cost of something that’s generally cost-prohibitive certainly doesn’t make that something more “affordable.”
And the “filling” of commercial spaces, again using public dollars, certainly smacks of government central planning and command economics.
Further from the P-G story:
“As for what taxes or fees could be imposed, the legislation, which has yet to be formally introduced, doesn’t say.
“It simply gives taxing bodies — whether they are cities, towns, or school districts [statewide]— the power to ‘levy a tax or impose additional fees’ or to ‘divert a tax or portion of a tax levied’ to help with the revitalization projects.”
And the P-G also says the legislation would allow jurisdictions to “create a separate authority to manage the program, award funding for eligible projects, enter contracts and issue bonds.”
Good grief – yet another unelected bureaucracy to “manage” yet another commanded market.
The draft legislation also would allow the taxes or fees to be earmarked to advance “critical infrastructure and amenity projects within the public realm that improve the overall quality of life necessary for attracting and retaining residents, businesses and visitors to downtown areas.”
Wow. How expansive. Who decides such things? The new unelected bureaucracy? How wishy-washy-able in interpretation and, thus, how ripe for abuse by the new command economics gendarmes.
The proposal, billed as a “Downtown reinvestment program” reportedly is said to be known as “DRIP” for short.
How apropos. For you’d have to be a drip to propose, and vote for, the latest in a long line of measures attempting to tax our way to prosperity, allowing developers in pursuit of profit to offload the risk that they alone should bear on the general public, all the while vesting new powers in an unelected bureaucracy with what could be unchecked powers.
Best call the plumbers now – before this drip becomes a full-fledged burst water main of cascading, very bad public policy.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
