The Post-Gazette reports that the City of Pittsburgh will outfit garbage and recycling trucks with GPS technology “in the same manner as the city’s snow plows and salt trucks.”
Allow us to translate: The city is spending another half-million dollars for a total new contract of about $2.6 million for a technology that more than a few observers insist does not work.
Hmmmm….
Allegheny County Council President Patrick Catena is proposing legislation that would, as the P-G reports it, “give property owners until Feb. 28 to appeal 2022 assessments. The deadline for filing such challenges was last March 31.”
That’s in light of the ongoing mess that is the county’s property tax assessment system. There hasn’t been a reassessment in a decade – and then only by court order — which has resulted in a patently unconstitutional (per the state Constitution) property tax system filled with gross inequities.
“I don’t think there’s a member of [the] council that doesn’t want to see all of this fixed,” Catena says. “I think we’re obligated to do what is best for the taxpayers of Allegheny County.”
Hmmmm…
If Catena were truly serious and sincere in his pronouncement, he would use his position and the bully pulpit it provides to spearhead the effort to have the only solution there is to this cluster cluck begin as soon as possible – a new reassessment and regular reassessments (every three years) thereafter.
Anything less is lip service.
As this “expert” and that “informed observer” – that is, university types, work force “development” types and chamber of commerce types — attempt to dissect Greater Pittsburgh’s continuing generalized population and economic malaise, there are a few very certain “somethings” missing from the discussion.
One would be the continuing failure of Pittsburgh Public Schools. And that failure long predates any fallout from the coronavirus pandemic; city schools have been a very expensive disaster for decades.
Then there’s the city’s increasingly seedy nature – open-air drug dealing, public urination and defecation and, certainly not least, the almost daily shootings, many fatal.
No amount of taxpayer-funded public relations and no number of upbeat prognostications from public officials wearing rose-colored glasses (or is it blinders?) can change the fact that Pittsburgh, in reality, has become a place to flee and not a place to be.
The malaise is crystal clear in the numbers – academic, economic and demographic – and those numbers don’t lie.
Pittsburgh is in deep trouble. And that no one in any leadership role has grabbed this multi-pronged situation by the scruff of the neck and sternly said “ENOUGH!” — then mapped out an counterattack plan — is the biggest thing that should making all of us go “Hmmmm… .”
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
