Monday: The Best Part of Waking Up**

On Wednesday of last week, Patrick Dowd scored what might have been a tidy little legislative coup for his election prospects:

Longtime city of Pittsburgh homeowners with low incomes would no longer have to apply annually for a property tax break under a bill tentatively approved by City Council yesterday.

Instead, under Councilman Patrick Dowd's legislation, residents 50 and older would only have to fill out the city's Act 77 tax relief form once. Then they would have their assessments frozen until they moved or reported an increase in income.

"We hear from folks that it is unfair that they have to fill this out every year," said Mr. Dowd of the Act 77 form. (P-G, Team Effort)

The vote was not unanimous.

Councilman Ricky Burgess abstained, because he had questions about how the city would know if, say, a senior homeowner won the lottery and no longer qualified for the benefit. (P-G, ibid)

That seemed like a reasonable counterargument. Dowd's immediate response was that "we should assume honesty in the taxpayer", which is not something I think it's ever necessarily that wise to assume when it comes to money.

By Friday, however, the thrust of Burgess's objection had shifted.

Councilman Ricky Burgess yesterday floated legislation, to be introduced Tuesday, that would bar budget-busting spending or tax cuts unless they were offset by cuts elsewhere, or driven by emergencies or court orders. (P-G, Rich Lord)

Sort of like pay-as-you-go budgeting.

"I do believe the recent legislation sponsored by Councilman Dowd unintentionally ... creates a deficit without showing how that deficit will be addressed," said Mr. Burgess. "When we pass it, we must also discuss how we're going to eliminate $1.2 million from expenses."

That figure is based on Finance Department estimates that 4,000 more seniors would get about $300 off their tax bills under Mr. Dowd's proposal. (P-G, ibid)

The rationale for this extreme budgetary sensitivity is the razor-wire thin, low five-digit surpluses projected in the outlying years of our five-year budget projections. Any modest shrinkage in revenue would seem to totally upset the applecart in 2012 and 2013.

That strikes me as a less compelling argument for two reasons. Firstly, there is Dowd's position that the $1.2 million is "not properly city money" anyway, seeing as how the city code already affords the tax break, and the annual paperwork is an unfortunate hurdle to receiving it.

More interesting, however, is the very nature of these present five-year projections. Dowd contended at his rally on Thursday that in response to other kinds of queries, City Finance Director Scott Kunka informed him, "The five year plan is just a piece of paper!" -- a real boo, grumble and hiss line, meant to further illustrate Dowd's longstanding point that the Ravenstahl / ICA plan is based on cosmetics and folly any darn way.

We'll see how it all shakes out.

Burgess publicly floated other legislation last week calling for voter referendums to approve any pay raises for elected officials in the future.

**-CORRECTIONS: However, that had to be may well be reeled back, as the Law Department had may have concerns that it would violate the Home Rule Charter.

Months ago, Burgess also pushed legislation that would have compelled a speedy completion of a new Act 47 Revised and Amended Recovery Plan. This was passed by Council yet vetoed by the mayor -- a veto that was accepted because it did have legal issues.

Aside from these, the Reverend has most frequently been in the news advancing legislation reconnoitering historic designation statutes vis a vis property rights.

Meanwhile...

Bad boys bad boys, watchagonna do?

* - UPDATE: Updated Dowd press release here: [Google documents] A snippet:

This sort of governance hurts us all. Think of the businesses. They look at the city and say, "No way. I don't want to do business with them. No way. I don't want to locate in a city that operates like that." When city government is for sale, businesses leave.

Now:

Mr. Ravenstahl, whose campaign is significantly funded by firms that do business with the city, said he allows "no quid pro quos. ... I would argue that the time frames of when these contributions are being made, if they would happen to be around the same time [as contracts], are coincidence rather than something that is planned. Oftentimes [contributions] are made around fundraisers." (P-G, Rich Lord)

Mr. Ravenstahl, Mr. Walko of the Water Authority and others seem to favor leaping directly into the "no quid pro quo" argument when it comes to defending these patterns.

That always struck me as a cynical and legalistic argument. As long as the characters around the table are careful not to enunciate or write down, "I'll give you this, DUH, if you give me that", then supposedly everybody is in the clear -- even if it is obvious there is mutual backscratching going on to a degree that it would not be occurring if the backscratching were not so conspicuously mutual.

By lunging for the quid pro quo line, it's like people are already preparing themselves for court, without pausing to consider that it could be just plain wrong.

Though the article seems to amount to a lot of new prose about an old issue, the meat of the drama is contained in this "Pay to Play?" chart. I'm not sure which contracts and contributions should stand out most strikingly therein, but the information is all nicely assembled for figuring that out.

Chad Hermann has some interesting thoughts about the article's placement in the print edition. I'd find it hard to justify an above-the-fold banner headline -- there's little new news here except Post-Gazette Newsroom Completes Data Entry -- but at the same time the tiny bottom left hand corner treatment seemed to do the work a real disservice.

Don't overlook...

The Trib examines Carmen Robinson's tumultuous history in the Pittburgh police department. (Trib, Jeremy Boren)

And finally...

What in blazes was the Trib's Joseph Sabino Mistick talking about?? I mean, really? Could it possibly have been similar matters to which I had alluded from the Bloomberg piece contained within this post?

I can be intentionally unclear at times, but if Joe set out to be any more cryptic he'd have to use a cipher and employ an albino monk.