If you can’t be honest with yourself, how can you be honest with the people you were elected to represent?
That has become the operative question for Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey as the city controller continues to sound alarm bells – and the media keep digging deeper into the root cause of those bells — over the city’s increasingly precarious financial situation and future.
As the Post-Gazette reported Sunday in its latest birddogging installment:
“Just six years after emerging from state receivership, Pittsburgh again is barreling toward a ‘fiscal cliff’ that could drain its bank accounts in only a few years.”
It cites internal documents it has obtained.
“The new tax revenue projections, detailed in a series of internal documents prepared by the city Controller’s Office, are starkly at odds with the public financial picture presented by Mayor Ed Gainey’s administration, whose five-year plan projects a healthy bank account balance of between $83 million and $160 million during that span,” the P-G reports.
“The administration’s projections fail to take into account a multimillion-dollar drop in property tax revenue driven by cratering Downtown real estate values. The mayor’s estimates also rely on two key streams of revenue — interest income that’s been massively increased in recent years by federal COVID aid and a tax on visiting athletes and performers — that could dry up as soon as this year.”
While the collapse of shrinking tax revenues indeed is a moving target (including the probability of giving refunds for past years), failure to reopen the new fiscal budget without line-item write downs would be nonfeasance.
But continuing to rely on revenue from the court-struck (at least for now) “jock tax” and drying up massive COVID-era federal subsidies borders on misfeasance or even malfeasance.
That the first casualty of governance too often has become the truth, honesty and integrity – the necessary foundational trifecta for sound governance – is a continuing tragedy in the City of Pittsburgh.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
