Divvying up new tax money won’t be a walk in the park
You’d think voting even a small tax hike up or down should be enough to get people to the polls, but no.
Voter turnout in the city Tuesday came in just over 26%. Only a quarter of registered voters decided narrowly — about 52% to 48% — to raise property taxes a half-mill in order to raise an estimated $10 million a year for our beleaguered parks.
If you want to describe winning half of one-quarter of the electorate another way — and Councilwoman Theresa KailSmith, an opponent of the tax hike, does — “The reality is about an eighth of the city voted to tax a majority of the city,” said Ms. KailSmith, who represents the western neighborhoods south of the rivers.
Yes, in the words* of Benjamin Franklin, participation was pathetic. (*I don’t know that anyone ever wrote down that quote, but Mr. Franklin lived more than eight decades. He must have strung those words together at least once.)
Everything is relative, though. Comparing other off-year elections, the Allegheny County Elections Division reports that city turnout was even lower — 22% and 23% — in 2015 and 2011.
Low turnout doesn’t necessarily portend a bad result. The late Sophie Masloff inherited the mayor’s position in 1988 when Richard Caligiuri died, having been City Council president. She won the five-candidate Democratic primary for mayor the following spring with only 28% of the vote, which works out to only about 14% of the adults living in Pittsburgh at the time. Mrs. Masloff is now widely revered and fondly remembered.
I voted against the parks tax, but I wavered for months. The parks need a lot of help. I’m in one nearly every day and it appears, despite county assessors saying I have a nice house, that this hike will cost me only about 37 cents a day. I can live with that, and have some confidence the investment will be a good one. But to use a term Mr. Franklin never did, this tax arrived bassackwards.
At a time when the city budget is in surplus and construction of high-end apartments continues apace, the city made no evident effort to divert revenue to parks. Nobody thinks it could devote $10 million a year, but letting the private Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy lead the way on a tax hike seemed the wrong way for a grownup government to operate.
The money that the conservancy and its allies spent on this campaign approached $800,000 heading into Election Day. Though four council members, the city controller and the county controller came out against the referendum, there was no organized opposition. But now that taxes are going up, expect council to tinker with the plans Mayor Bill Peduto and the conservancy have for parks.
According to the mayor’s office, the public works department spends roughly $12.5 million on parks maintenance. But even with another $10 million expected for the parks kitty, mayoral spokesman Timothy McNulty said last week it doesn’t intend to shift any of that public works money to other areas.
Councilman Anthony Coghill, of Beechview, represents District 4, which came out strongly against this referendum. With “roads caving in and houses flooding,” Mr. Coghill said, there is no shortage of problem areas the city might put money. (The referendum didn’t beat 35% in wards including Brookline, Beechview, Carrick, Sheraden, Overbrook and Hays. It won big majorities — polling above 70% — in the wards anchored by the
Hill District and Oakland.)
There are 165 parks, some of them tiny tot lots, scattered throughout the city. Proponents of the referendum pitched it as a way to help all of them, not just the five regional parks that received $6.7 million for capital and operating expenses last year through the county Regional Asset District tax: Emerald View, Frick, Highland, Riverview and Schenley. Mr. Coghill says the new revenue should be evenly divided nine ways among the nine council districts, but that’s not the current plan.
The conservancy, which says it will gather private funds to match the tax money, has publicly ranked all parks for capital investments, from first to last priority, on its website. That’s the result of a long listening tour, but there will have to be more listening ahead because its priorities aren’t necessarily council’s.
Jayne Miller, president and CEO of the conservancy, was on vacation Friday, could not be reached for comment and nobody else could speak to these issues, a conservancy spokesman said. That’s unfortunate because the math shows that another $10 million atop the $150 million in real estate tax revenue that the city projects for 2020 would be a 6.666% increase.
Actually, those sixes stretch on forever. Consider that a reminder that the devil, as always, is in the details.