The Tuition Tax: Robbing Peter to Pay Paul

[Updated: After posting the note below, I was advised that the city already has a tax on local income received by non-resident professional athletes. Here's a link. What I'm talking about below is related, but perhaps a little different. The existing rule is a form of income tax. (Of course, it should be possible to raise the rate and increase the $2-$3 million already generated annually.) What I'm talking about is the same kind of "usage fee" or "service fee" that is the conceptual driver behind the "tuition tax."] This morning's PG editorializes that the proposed "tuition tax" on Pittsburgh college students isn't a great idea -- but the PG, like the mayor, can't think of any other solution to Pittsburgh's pension deficit. The underlying problem, according to the PG, is that "Harrisburg" won't solve Pittsburgh's pension problems, and Pittsburgh doesn't want to let Harrisburg take over the pension system. (Why the paradox in that statement is ignored still puzzles me.) But there are other solutions. Here is one: Who is better able to afford paying an extra sum per year for the privilege of enjoying all the amenities, services, and privileges afforded by the City of Pittsburgh? College students, or professional athletes? Don't enact a "tuition tax." Instead, enact an "amusement tax": Every pro athlete who competes in Pittsburgh, including both Steelers, Pirates, and Penguins and players visiting teams -- full active rosters, whether or not they play a particular game -- could pay a very modest percentage of his annual income (salary plus prorated bonus plus endorsements) to the City of Pittsburgh. Athletes already pay a pro-rated income tax to states where they compete as visitors, so the concept of local taxes isn't foreign. Given the number of athletes, the number of games in Pittsburgh in each sport, and the amount of money needed ($15 million per year for the pensions, plus a $1 million in pocket change for the Carnegie Library system), it shouldn't be too difficult to come up with an appropriate tax rate. Would this embolden other cities with pro sports teams to do the same? Sure. I think that pro teams generally take more than they give from their host cities as it is. Would this serve as a disincentive to pursue a career as an athlete rather than a career in some other field? Maybe. I think that a little disincentive to be a pro athlete, and some incentive to do something else, would be great. In case it seems to overreach to cover the whole $16 million gap by taxing athletes, we might collect, say, half the money from pro athletes and half the money elsewhere. Just the other day, according to the paper, "The Rivers Casino will pay its $7.5 million a year toward construction of the new arena in two installments under an agreement approved by the city-Allegheny County Sports & Exhibition Authority board." What if the Sports & Exhibition Authority board sucked it up for the good of the city, its libraries, and its college students, and agreed to turn that money over to the mayor? Obviously, that would leave the arena looking for cash, and Pens fans and other prospective attendees of arena events would scream foul. But who is better able to bear the cost (and should bear the cost) of arena construction? Those who will use the arena, or ... It's a borrow-from-Peter-to-pay-Paul situation regardless of how you add it up. The only question is who is going to be Peter, and who is going to be Paul.

Space and Place in Pittsburgh

New to this blog: The Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy Blog has been added to the "Green Pittsburgh" links on the left side. And I quite liked: David Owen's piece in Sunday's Post-Gazette on the sustainability of dense urban centers. Worldwide, city populations are growing, which means that it is high time that we looked at the environmental advantages as well as the environmental challenges of urbanism. There is some good news in there for Pittsburgh: The city still has the bones of a dense urban center, which means that it could be well-positioned in environmental terms. There is some bad news, too: Pittsburgh may have its urban bones, but it doesn't have a comparably dense urban population. At least, some neighborhoods are far denser than others. It might seem to be a paradox, but it's not, that sustainable urbanism includes conscious attention to public space. This was an important takeaway from my trek to Amsterdam last month. I suspect that the real reason that Pittsburghers feel that the city/region is undergoing a "renaissance" has more to do with rehabilitating some salient public spaces than with building construction, football and ice hockey championships, and misleading "livability" awards. Well-designed public space has functional payoffs and psychic ones. I'm thinking of changes over the last decade to the Allegheny River riverfront, Point State Park, Market Square (still in progress), parts of the Mon River riverfront, Schenley Plaza, Frick Park, and Highland Park -- to name just a few. Is there another American city of Pittsburgh's size that has a better collection of public spaces?

Vote Today!

Vote! Vote! Vote! If you live in Pittsburgh, don't skip the polls because you think that the Mayor's race is a foregone conclusion. Some people think otherwise. And there is a Supreme Court of PA election that is very, very important!

More Bullying From Mylan

Getting sued, even getting threatened with a lawsuit, is a chilling experience. And it sure takes the edge off the belief that you're just doing your job. Over at the Post-Gazette, I can't even imagine what writers Len Boselovic and Patricia Sabatini are going through in the wake of yet another lawsuit by Mylan, the target of their excellent investigative reporting, against them and the Post-Gazette. This new suit expresses anger over the same underlying circumstances that framed Mylan's first lawsuit, filed back in August and now pending in federal court, where the PG has moved to dismiss it. The first suit accused the PG of appropriating confidential information and using it to impugn the company. The new suit accuses the PG of reporting false information. Even non-lawyers will note some incongruities here. The first lawsuit gave the impression that Mylan acknowledged that the reporting was accurate; Mylan was upset about how the PG went about its work. The second lawsuit clearly accuses the PG of defamation -- reporting false information. So, Mylan: Is it true, or is it false? The company can't have it both ways. It's always possible that some information was true and some was false. But the news reports (not only in the PG, but elsewhere) suggest strongly that it's all the same stuff. And what about suing twice? I haven't seen the lawsuits themselves, so there may be a way to characterize them as legitimately distinct from a procedural standpoint. Usually, a single set of events gives an alleged victim the right to sue once, characterizing events in various ways under different legal theories. But the new suit gives the impression that Mylan's first suit was a false start; these aren't just different legal theories, but a whole different version of events. Now, it wants a do-over.

Pittsburgh, Infantilized

I wasn't the only person who reacted with horror to Cindy Ravenstahl's creepy defense of her son, the mayor, in the Post-Gazette on Friday. I didn't do a grand tour, but Reg Henry - despite working for the One of America's Great Newspapers that published the piece - hit the essential points. Dan Acklin's "vote for my nephew" defense of challenger Kevin Acklin was no better. If you take the op-eds seriously, then the only plausible interpretation is that the candidates, their families, and the Post-Gazette editorial page are conspiring to infantilize Pittsburgh. I looked up "infantilize Pittsburgh" to see if anyone had used that phrase before, and it turns out that the Post-Gazette itself put that headline on a piece by Mark DeSantis (remember him?) that criticized a proposal by the City of Pittsburgh to limit internet use by city employees. So at least the paper is aware of what's going on. The only other plausible explanation is that the Ravenstahl and Acklin pieces are jokes at the public's expense. As John McEnroe might have said, they cannot be serious. City residents should vote for Luke Ravenstahl because Mom said so? Kevin Acklin because Uncle Dan said so? If I were a city resident, I might vote for Dok Harris solely because he had the good sense not to come out say that we should vote for him because Franco said so - though Franco, being a proud father, is happy to say in private that we should vote for his son. But if the Ravenstahl and Acklin pieces are inside jokes rather than serious politicking, then instead I should vote against Dok because his sense of humor clearly doesn't match that of his rivals. Ravenstahl and Acklin know how to tickle Pittsburgh's funny bone. Why didn't Dok play along with the Halloween week masquerade? It is a good thing, one might conclude, that Pittsburgh is such a well-kept secret around most of the US and most of the world. Because for all of its pre- and post-G20 Summit bluster, Pittsburgh isn't capable of playing at the top levels as a world city. As weird as politics get in California (Jerry Brown wants to be governor again; the Governator is exchanging public profanities with a member of the state Assembly), New York (David Paterson wants to remain governor), Rome (Berlusconi and the Italian media), and Afghanistan (Karzai trying to avoid a vote boycott), that weirdness is the weirdness of big places and big issues. Whether Pittsburgh's mayoral campaign is infantilizing the city or playing it with one enormous inside joke, Pittsburgh still suffers from the weirdness of being a very, very small town.

Mad as Hell, and Not Going to Take it Anymore!

At the Pittsburgh Comet, Bram Reichbaum has given notice: The blog will wind down. I know from my own experience what this means: license to bleat and boast a bit about what it means to have tried -- and apparently, to have failed -- to attract the notice that one thinks is due a blog about serious topics in Pittsburgh. Along those lines, today, Bram winds up and delivers an uppercut to the mediocrity of Pittsburgh's media, and Pittsburgh's audience. It's a thoughtful, passionate rant about everything that is wrong with local television. Much of it applies with equal vigor to our local newspapers. Bram has been backfilling the failings of the paid media, and he's discouraged and exhausted. Someone who works as hard as Bram does at his blog, for as little compensation as he receives, certainly deserves gratitude -- and a break. Agree or disagree with his day-to-day analysis, there aren't many paid reporters in town who dig into the details of the mysteries of Pittsburgh's politics as regularly as he does. (For the record, Bram and I have corresponded occasionally, but we've never met.) Along the way, Bram discovered what almost all professional journalists eventually discover, whether or not they work in Pittsburgh: Investigating and reporting real news -- the news that matters to the future of a community, and that (surprisingly) even includes what happens on the playing field -- is backbreaking work. The hours are long, the wages are low, and gratitude from an appreciative and adoring public is rare. Journalism is partly a calling and partly a form of public service: You do it because you have no choice, and because it needs to be done. The payoffs are meted out inconsistently, unexpectedly, and over long periods of time, when they are meted out at all. Bram makes a plea for serious, sustained coverage of local news. In principle, I think that he's right, and I've written here about related issues: The future of paid media, especially failing print media, lies in figuring out how to map the economy of the neighborhood onto the network of networks that we call the Internet. Mapping the economy of the neighborhood onto itself used to be the name of the game, but now it's like getting a recalcitrant child to eat spinach. You can't force people to eat the journalistic equivalent of what's good for them; it turns out that the neighborhood often just doesn't want to think that hard about itself -- not when there is OJ to watch, or (Not in the) Balloon Boy, or Facebook to waste time with. Few people who aren't absolute masters of their domains really enjoy looking in the mirror each morning all that closely; it's much more fun to look through someone else's window. In other words, I suspect that the media enterprise is overrated as an agent for change. We like to pretend that the TV station, the newspaper, and even the thoughtful blog can shine a light on corrupt government and, by force of the First Amendment, make things better. People will read the news, emerge from their huts with pitchforks and torches, and toss the miscreants into the streets. But if the world ever worked that way (and maybe there was a time when it did), today it works more indirectly than all that. I don't pretend (as I once might have) that this blog has any direct influence on the direction of the Pittsburgh region. What I can pretend is that the blog occasionally gives me access to conversations with people who are creating, organizing, and innovating in organizations, institutions, and neighborhoods around town. Pittsburghers *do* care about what happens here; they just don't often care for much self-scrutiny in the media. We have become The Truman Show. Fixing The Truman Show doesn't mean turning fake news into authentic news; it means breaking out of the myth that what happens on camera or on the screen can really control our destiny. Jim Carrey, prophet! Who knew? I suspect that Bram has figured this out; at least, I hope so. My experience, and that of at least one other once-retired local blogger, teaches that he will be back.

Not Pittsburgh Politics

Items I've noticed while focusing on other stuff recently: New Girl Elaine LaBalme discovered that Cleveland really is a nice place. For all of the passion behind the Pittsburgh/Cleveland rivalry, and for all of the short-term benefit that Pittsburgh derives from performing "better," economically-speaking, than other Rust Belt cities, in the long term Pittsburgh is better off if its counterpart cities (Cleveland, Baltimore, Buffalo, Detroit) are doing well, too. That's a tall order, I know. Speaking of Detroit: "It Takes a Village to Open a Bistro," from the New York Times. I would love to read counterpart stories of community enterprise in Pittsburgh. Eve Picker has boarded the in-migration train. Indeed: As I've written here for some time, as Harold Miller has written on his blog and at the PG, and has Chris Briem has argued at Null Space (and don't forget Jim Russell at Burgh Diaspora), Pittsburgh's real population problem is not that our young people leave. It's that not enough new people move in. And read this account of yet another debate about Pittsburgh branding. Because Pittsburgh has reinvented itself, say some, should Pittsburgh have a brand? Does it need a brand? Can Pittsburgh be its own brand? Why isn't Pittsburgh selling its reinvention? Audrey Russo of the PTC makes a critical point: You can't have a brand if you don't have a product. (Well, modern marketers think that you can sell a brand as a brand, but that sort of thing just brings big money to a few people and a lot of trouble to everyone else.) Her quote: "There's cynicism that we haven't been bragging about our achievements ... But in all fairness, there's nothing to brag about yet."

Cleveburgh Works

I (as in not Mike) have been woefully behind in my Pittsblog duties, but this belongs here more than anywhere else. Beyond the more general Cleveburgh thoughts of late there is story in the Cleveland Plain Dealer today focusing on economic development efforts up the turnpike. Yet one of the most prominent things in the article is talk of Pittsburgh’s own Innovation Works....  singled out some years ago in a report done for them by the folks at McKinsey as "the 12 best regional development growth organizations in the world". See: Jumpstart offers a solid base for emerging Cleveland-area businesses, by Marcia Pledger, Cleveland Plain Dealer. October 24, 2009,

So Long to the Renaissance?

Never forget that Pittsburgh often cares more about who wins and who loses than about the future of the region as a whole. Library branches will be closing. Now UPMC wants to close its Braddock hospital. The URA is thinking about paying a developer so that a different developer can build apartments on the South Side. Did someone say regional planning? Is anyone surprised that these decisions were not publicized until after the feel-good G-20 media blitz had passed? Does the pattern of wins and losses reflect anything new? Thought not, on all counts. Meanwhile, the new Dunkin' Donuts in Squirrel Hill is doing land office business, and it's kosher. Baked morsels for less! Taste great, spiritually fulfilling. Does this mean that the tide of the Cupcake Class is receding?

The Costs of Football

Come Sunday afternoon, I'll join friends and family in black-and-gold, expecting the Steelers to mash the Browns. But I'll be thinking a little differently about the price that's paid down the line by the athletes who entertain and inspire us. Our pleasure, their suffering. You may think differently, too, if you read this GQ story about brain injuries, which begins in Pittsburgh with a scientist named Bennet Omalu, a blessing of sorts from his boss, Cyril Wecht, and what happened to Steelers icon "Iron Mike" Webster.