Monday: Early Groundhog Day

It is after the conclusion of policy arcs -- budget cycles, development deadlines, sometimes calendar years -- that a few more people than usual, having gotten roused by the noisome drama sometime before the very end, suddenly realize "Hey, if we had a better functioning government, we wouldn't have so much inefficient, discordant inanity!"

"What we need is some better politicians, man," they'll say, in a voice not unlike that of Tommy Chong. "We need to have a civil society that's going to like, demand real reform from these politicians and like, unlock this town's latent civic-minded passion in a prismatic trans-dimensional lotus-blossom of good government energies, you dig?"

Meanwhile, right about now, most of the actual politicians (who do try pretty hard) are like, "Good government? Again? Already? Look, the only good government I'm interested in right now is this two-by-four into which I'm presently hammering rusty nails -- and how I'm going to storm City Hall with it, swing it good and hard, and somehow come back out with the playground I promised to good old Ozzie and the expanded Senior Center hours I promised to good old Helen. That's all I want to hear from Good Government until like, June. June is open."

Which brings us in the very short-term to the thirty-odd 2011 budget amendments that the Harris majority submitted to Mayor Ravenstahl. Earlier I had predicted that His Honor would honor about half of those, but now, having thought about it with the training in political science, public relations, and moral and political philosophy that I do enjoy (or that my bookshelf tells me I did at one point) I realize that he's only going to let three to five of those survive.

Three to five projects. Few enough such that those he selects will stand out -- letting him take some credit and get some bang for his buck -- and so he can at the same time gesture to all the others and say, "Well, we're having some financial trouble. I have no problem being the responsible one."

In fact, now that he's read this, he's probably only going to pick two. (Allow me to humbly submit that it's probably time to get our arms around the uniquely challenging South Side situation.)

Then comes veto-override time -- and unless some votes switch over because they've been successfully jimmied and finagled with those two-by-fours -- it's on to the new year's business.

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And what will this year bring? It's hard to say. If we're looking at the pension problem, there really isn't much to be done on the city level, that is until we run out of money again. We can refinance a bond here and there, maybe. We can lobby the State to deregulate how we might provide for our workers' retirement needs, but we'd have to contend with those who wonder why anybody with any competence would want to work at government salaries without the promise of an old-fashioned pension.

I suppose we could take up the suggestion to piggy-back on the state pension agency's own professional fund management in a way that preserves our baseline local autonomy. That'd be sweet.

There are at least a couple of development projects in the pipeline to look after. The Hill District. The Allegheny Riverfront. Fun, fun, fun as always -- dealing with the Planning Commission and the URA and the SEA shrugging and pointing at one other and the state DCED.

Council should have its own legal officer before too long. That will spice up anything that already happens to be on the table, but shouldn't offer anything new.

There's an election. Although I'm a fan of those, these do not typically focus minds on lasting reform in the near-term.

So I really don't know what we're going to be talking about. Which is weird, because this Harris majority, they have a full year in the open field to run wild (and probably only one full year) and do their best to be change agents. When they can manage it, they can even become the Dowd Super Mecha-majority and absolutely clean house -- that is, clean house of whatever it is that is available to them.

Which is precious little. Authorities are authorities, commissions are commissions, the treasury is the treasury. Even simple funding requests can be ignored about as easily as any old weakly-constructed new law or ordinance.

Maybe the Post-Gazette is on to something with its suggestion to look at the Charter. Not in terms of recall elections -- it is my opinion we get enough elections here, and are not in conspicuous need of any further public attentions paid to job-retention. (It is also my opinion that if Ravenstahl should be faulted for anything in the last cycle, it can only be for not being persuasive and savvy enough to get his infrastructure lease deal passed -- a deal which ultimately will pass in some form in some fast-approaching era. I'm not sold on the notion that Takeover-Avoidance-By-Shenanigans was the best move for the city, nor were any of the other Band-Aids, yet I can understand how he got pressured into allowing the dratted thing to occur only after appropriate stringent objections.)

However, Pittsburgh is structured as a strong-mayor government -- and maybe if society and governance is terribly complex, and the pooling and accumulation of power is what it is, then we should look at becoming a slightly less strong-mayor government? Anyone? I heard one place to start is by looking at requiring votes of Council to approve the removal of city department heads and maybe even some commission and authority board members, for example. We could start by researching best practices.