Thursday, December 11, 2003

Pennsylvania: If we were any slower we'd be in reverse. Maybe that should be our new state slogan. As I watched my city grovel Tuesday night for the dubious reward of becoming the eighth and largest city in Pennsylvania to be declared "distressed" in the past 15 years, I tried not to think about how far we haven't gone.

You have to drop before Pennsylvania will pick you up. That's the law. Ours is not to reason why. Ours is but to beg or die.

You can argue that Mayor Tom Murphy and City Council have played a bad hand badly, but no one can argue that Pennsylvania cities have been dealt a good hand. They face four major problems they haven't the power to alter.

In an economy largely driven by health and education, cities hosting hospitals and universities work the wrong end of the street. The institutions don't pay taxes, but their workers do.

In a state where the core cities cover freakishly little ground and surrounding suburbs are split hundreds of ways, it's not brain surgery to figure out who benefits most from that set-up. It's the 'burbs that can set up their minimum lot sizes to attract surgeons or their economic peers.

People should live where they choose. But the thing is, without a hospital, surgery is very tough. I also have a vague understanding of opportunistic disease. When the body weakens, what once was harmless may no longer be held in check. And this body is weaker than the Steelers' secondary.

A bill has been introduced in Harrisburg to provide grants to counties and cities that host nonprofits. It has gotten nowhere. Nor has the bill to keep columnists from mixing metaphors.

Because of the way the business privilege tax is written, the corner dry cleaner pays more business taxes to the city than the newspaper or the bank. That's Pennsylvania law. That's nuts. But I repeat myself.

Act 111 is the state law that allows an arbitrator to reward contracts to police and firefighters without regard to the community's ability to pay. Didn't I mention that's nuts?

The occupational privilege tax, a $10 fee paid annually to the community where one works, was introduced 40 years ago. It must have been some big deal back when the average annual household income was $7,700. Today $10 is a gag gift at an office party.

Other states have used annexation, government mergers and regional taxing to meet the challenge of the modern economy. Given that we have the most full-time legislators of any state, you'd think this would give us more ability to get things done, but you'd be wrong. Instead, our system gives every legislator 252 colleagues to point to and say, "Hey, it's not me. It's them. Them and that mayor."

As long as the people living in and around the failing cities buy the argument that the debacle is solely the fault of local office holders, the Legislature has no political reason to change state law.

So even the plan presented in October by a commission led by a couple of marquee conservative names -- former U.S. Steel chairman David Roderick and former Republican National Committeewoman Elsie Hillman -- got nowhere.

The Roderick-Hillman plan had severe flaws. It offered no real cure for the city's business tax inequities, and it left the nonprofit issue open. But it still beat anything from Harrisburg.

On Tuesday, financial investigators hired by the state recommended that Pittsburgh be declared financially distressed. Yesterday, a bill designed to stop that -- sponsored by Rep. Mike Turzai, R-Bradford Woods, and Jeff Habay, R-Shaler -- was approved by a House committee.

At the Tuesday hearing, Roderick noted that the city likely will run out of money next month unless it borrows some more millions and goes deeper in the hole. By next autumn, Pittsburgh will be "super qualified" for distressed status, he suggested.

The Legislature is unmoved, but what reason does it give city residents not to move? Show me a successful city and you're pointing across the Pennsylvania border.

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