Your Guide to the Coming Pensions / Parking Showdown

In case anyone is interested.

Thurs, Sept. 9: Rosh Hashanah.

Wed, Sept. 15: City receives bids from seven companies competing to win Pittsburgh's parking lease concession. City and Parking Authority officials review these in a secure, sound-proof sensory deprivation chamber to make their determination of a prospective winner.

Approximately Thurs, Sept. 16: Media reports on the bids, the goings-on in the room, and which company was / will be selected.

Sun, Sept. 18: Yom Kippur.

Thurs, Sept 23: Under a full moon, Mayor submits the city's 2011 budget proposal to the Intergovernmental Cooperation Authority (ICA) for its approval. This budget will reflect certain proceeds and synergies from the parking lease, as inextricably and as frequently as possible. The paper itself may be billed to an account pegged to future parking lease revenues. (UPDATED: The budget, more likely to be submitted a day earlier, will reflect a sharp LACK of parking lease revenues.)

Approximately Mon, Sept 27: Finance Scholars Group will present its $250,000 findings to its client, City Council, and to the media. Pittsburgh's parking assets will be determined to be worth approximately seven hundred trillion dollars. Also, a half dozen potent yet scholarly synonyms for the term "rip-off" will be used, along with many similarly potent and scholarly synonyms for "egregious". EG: a "remarkable soaking". Try your own.

Approximately Fri, Oct 1: Controller Michael Lamb and Councilman Patrick Dowd will hold a press conference in front of the statue of Washington and Guyasuta, to reveal their new plan to leverage our parking assets while keeping them public to generate at least $200 million and thereby avert a state takeover. This will probably be almost identical to their old plan to leverage our parking assets while keeping them public to generate at least $200 million and avert a state takeover, i.e., give teh parking assets directly to the pension fund, only with some financial instrument inserted this time as an emulsifier and phlebotinum. Somebody from the Mayor's office later that day will tell us this idea is both illegal and hilarious. They may or may not be correct on both counts.

Approximately Tue, Oct 5: Council members Ricky Burgess, Daniel Lavelle and Theresa Smith will draw straws. Short straw will introduce the lease transaction as a bill to City Council.

Wed, Oct 6 UPDATE: Mayor, Zober depart for Shanghai.

Approximately Thurs, Oct 7: The ICA will approve the Mayor's 2011 budget with particular gushing reference to the bold, ingenious, responsible, encouraging and handsome maneuver of leasing the city's parking assets, and for such an excellent price at that. The Mayor's people will in turn market this approval of the city's financial watchdogs as independent verification from neutral experts, who this year are in no way feckless marionettes of university trustees. (UPDATE: This may now happen after Columbus Day.)

Mon, October 11: Columbus Day. Everybody gets out of bed at 6:00 AM and dons Sestak and Onorato pins and acts real friendly. Everything is quiet. Too quiet.

Approximately Tues, Oct 12: Around this time, you've got to figure some jack-in-the-box will pop up out of nowhere holding signs which read, "POLITICALLY CONNECTED", "WIELDS CLOUT", and maybe even, "BECAME AN ISSUE IN LAST YEAR'S MAYOR'S RACE" (UPDATE: more likely, just "IN THE NETWORK"). Doug Shields and Bill Peduto will fax urgent letters to the International Criminal Court at the Hague and Superman, respectively.

Fri, Oct 15 UPDATE: Mayor, Zober return.

Up to and including approximately Wed, Oct 20 27: Hard to see the future is, but it might go a little something like this: the Mayor will have impressed upon everybody, as is his annual tradition, that if we don't heed the ICA and Act 47 and approve the structurally necessary facets of a duly approved and legal budget on time (if we want to do the lease deal, it requires a couple months' lead-time before year's end to ramp up), then by rule a giant Monte Python foot will come out of the sky and smash Pittsburgh to smithereens. This will be more than enough for the Post-Gazette editorial board to do the requisite gymnastics. The Lamb / Dowd proposal will fail either for want of legality, a clear likelihood of being made illegal by a state legislature which dearly desires us to lease our parking assets, or personal politics. Dowd will say "Well, I tried," and then finally either Council members Harris or Rudiak will need to be prevailed upon with cake and candy to shun the prospect of going into hundreds of millions of dollars worth of standard-issue debt. If the administration is successful in this, Burgess will give the The Reason You Suck Speech and call for a vote. If unsuccessful, he and Peduto will jointly broker a face-saving arrangement that picks up the pieces of the 2011 budget along with the ICA and the Mayor, after the lease deal is scrapped in favor of $220 million in bonded debt plus interest over 20 years (or the unlikely phlebotinum-sandwich, which might conceivably escalate the drama through even March).

A week from Shavuot: Not even by this time will anybody speak in favor of ever allowing the state to take over our pension fund management, save for a some anonymous Internet commentators. Not as such.