It is now up to the voters of Allegheny County to reject the self-dealing, power-grabbing profligates of County Council.
A year after raising property taxes by 36 percent, the council, in two 9-6 votes on Tuesday, agreed to place before the electorate measures to amend the Home Rule Charter in a scheme to uncap the council’s operating budget (the sky being the new limit?) and grant themselves full benefits (for their part-time work).
It is, of course, anathema to what was intended when, nearly 30 years ago, voters approved the mothballing of governance by the board of three commissioners in favor of a chief executive and a part-time County Council of citizen legislators with, purposely, limited powers.
If approved by voters on Nov. 3, the 15-member County Council that now has three support employees and an annual budget of just under $1.2 million, would expand drastically with each councilor able to have a district office and staff and no longer any charter-imposed cap on spending.
Additionally, they would be eligible for health and life insurance and pension benefits (from a pension system currently sucking for air by being only 30 percent funded).
This is the same governing body, in its 2023 iteration, that eliminated the rule requiring council members to be paid per council session attended (totaling $11,000 per annum) in favor an automatic, guaranteed $11,000 annual salary – with no docking for non-attendance.
In the run-up to the vote, one councilor rationalized the budget change this way: “It doesn’t increase our budget. All it does is it eliminates the cap.”
Ahem. Orwell could not have said it better.
Another argued that voter approval doesn’t automatically mean that the council’s budget cap – 0.4 percent of the county’s locally levied tax revenues — will go bye-bye or that the council will automatically receive taxpayer-funded perks.
All that will require County Council-passed enabling legislation, the councilor reminded.
Gee, what do you think will happen? Cue the laugh track.
A third council member decreed the proposals kosher because it will be up voters to decide the issue. As if the councilor should be thanked for the council not illegally attempting the changes by fiat.
If the nine members of the Allegheny County Council majority pushing for more power through a larger council budget and personal perks had any decency, they would have asked the Government Review Commission — now doing its Home Rule Charter-mandated every-10-year-review — to consider its wish list.
We can’t imagine the commission, if it showed fealty to the charter’s founding intent, would entertain such self-service malarkey under the guise of providing better public service.
What we can imagine is the Noxious Nine and their acolytes mounting a slick public relations/advertising campaign in an attempt to snooker the public into believing that their cause somehow is in the public’s best interest.
To that we have two words for the perk-pimping county councilors:
Game on.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
