Author: andrea

I participated in a short brainstorming session this morning at an office downtown in which the subject was how to plug newcomers and young people into opportunities to effect change in the city.  You could/would be surprised at how many different ideas people have about what it means to “change” a city (or a county or a state or a country).  It’s a charged word, as we know from the current presidential race, and in different contexts obviously it means totally different things — but in the context of a discussion about how to transform a city by engaging more people under 40, what would you think it means?

My approach is (obviously?) to think about political and governmental change.  P2 has done some navel-gazing about what its purpose is and I think we’ve all decided amicably to just let it be what folks make of it, but there’s no doubt we started out trying to change the city by re-making the Democratic party here, and that’s still where my head often gets stuck.  There are lots of ways to make a difference here:  there are new companies and business districts and markets and neighborhoods and groups to build up and reach out to; there are public information tools and communication and networking strategies to plug in; there are architectural gems to preserve and re-imagine and plan for in the future; etc., etc.  But I bang my head up against the question of how to change the way public monies get allocated to public projects here all the time, and I assume (not always fairly) others do too.

If you had a game plan for how to engage people in changing Pittsburgh, where would you start?

Come to the Pittsburgh Town Hall Meeting to learn about PennFuture’s Campaign for Great Green Jobs.

Tuesday May 13, 11:30-1:00 p.m.
Lunch provided, RSVP required

GSP Consulting

Landmarks Building, Station Square
100 West Station Square Drive, Suite 500

Learn how you can save money, fight global warming, and create Great Green Jobs for Pennsylvania.

Speakers:

• Kathleen McGinty, Secretary, Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection

·         Dr. Jerry Paytas, GSP Consulting

·         Chris Koch, GTECH

• Jeaneen Zappa, Green Building Alliance
• Heather Sage, PennFuture
• Representatives from local renewable energy and energy efficiency companies

The meeting will outline the statewide campaign with more than 125 endorsers, geared to move legislation forward in the State Senate which would provide state investment and incentives in clean energy and energy conservation. Pennsylvania needs this legislation NOW, if we are to be part of the new clean energy economy.

Two bills before the State Senate, the Energy Savings Bill – House Bill 2200 and the Clean Energy Funding Bill – Special Session House Bill 1, best exemplify the changes needed to bring Pennsylvania into the new energy economy. These bills would give families and businesses the tools and information they need to cut electricity costs and their energy bills, fight global warming, and create Great Green Jobs for Pennsylvania.

Come to this town hall meeting to find out how you can be part of the solution. Stop by for coffee, tea, and lunch with the people already working to build a sustainable Pennsylvania. Registration form is online to RSVP.

Sponsored by Citizens for Pennsylvania’s Future (PennFuture) and GSP Consulting

To RSVP and for more information, call 412-258-6681 or email sage@pennfuture.org

Does anyone have a p icture of the poster that was distributed to polling places by the Allegheny County Board of Elections proscribing any photography inside the polling place?  I was staring straight at the one in my precinct for the better part of Tuesday but stupidly forgot I could take a picture of the poster, if not the polling place itself.

I’ve looked around online but haven’t found any ordinance or mention in the home rule charter or any other instructions at the state level proscribing photography inside the polling place.  Am I missing something?

Are we all missing something?

I’d like some clarification, personally.  Join me at County Council’s next regular meeting on May 6 to ask questions.

I have what you might call a conventional marriage, in that I’m a woman married to a man, and we have a little boy and a few cats and a mortgage and a station wagon.  This conventional marriage is partly to blame for why I’m so late in posting my contribution for Blog for Equality Day. 

For those of you who aren’t privileged enough to enjoy the Exalted State of a conventional marriage, let me tell you:  the blessed institution comes with an awful lot of inequality built into it, and for starters there’s apparently this whole section that got left out of the executive summary I read before I spoke those vows that says if you’re the one in the marriage with boobs, basically taking care of the baby is your responsibility; whereas the other one, the one without boobs?  He can change his plans at the last minute to have dinner with colleagues and then work late at the office.  So:  sorry this post comes at the end of a very, very long day.

I used to be totally mystified by the stupid right-wing rhetoric about “defending marriage” or “saving marriage.”  When I first heard someone use that phrase, I think I just snorted bewilderedly at the idea of legions of straight marriages exploding in messy divorce as husbands and wives everywhere looked at images of gay people being married at city hall on TV and immediately saw that the Exalted State they thought they were enjoying had in fact become a Prison of Inequality and that A Better Option was now available — “See you later, honey!  I’m off to Boston to find true happiness!” I imagined that that door slamming on the Suburban American Marriage would be like the slamming door at the end of Ibsen’s Doll’s House, shocking the audiences of the late 19th century with the heretical notion of women’s autonomy. 

But that’s not what the rhetoric is about at all, of course.  The bigots aren’t out to preserve their own marriages from any outside threat of temptation or pollution or individual empowerment – they’re trying to preserve a legal privilege for themselves.  What they really want to “save” is the complex set of civic, social, fiscal and legal definitions that afford them an advantage over people who don’t wear wedding bands.  They value the Exalted State because, well, it’s exalted.  Over others.

Can you imagine the capitalist classes being so bald in their attack on the middle and working classes?  If the estate tax had been nicknamed, say, the “Defense of Wealth” act, instead of the “death tax”?  Preserve our privilege!  Don’t share it with anyone else!  While we’re at it, let’s bring back feudal serfdom, and the droit du seigneur!

Before my husband and I were married we lived for several years in New York as a Domestic Partnership, a type of legally protected long-term commitment that could also be outlawed by the proposed Marriage Protection Amendment.  Without it, we couldn’t have afforded to pay for separate health insurance policies.  In all honesty, claiming the tax benefit of a single return was one of the big reasons why we officially tied the knot when we did — invoking civic sanction and recognition for a committed relationship that had already stood the test of six years, four apartments, five different jobs, thousands of miles of travel, and a new kitten.  We got to ask the District Justice who married us to please take out all the mentions of God from the ceremony, and we’ve never asked for any other kind of authoritative blessing on the union – what we got was the real deal, a civil marriage, something so simple and so obvious.

Here’s some of what it gives us the right to do:

• If one of us is critically injured or ill, the other one can visit at the hospital.
• We can buy health insurance together at a discounted rate.
• We can file tax returns that accurately reflect the fact that one of us makes much more money than the other, and that two of us live mostly on a single income.
• We can call ourselves a family, and no one gives it a second thought.

Pretty exalted stuff, don’t you think?  You can see why someone would want to deny others these privileges, can’t you?  No?

Neither can I.

Please — don’t let this farce go any further.  Contact your senator and let them know:  SB1250 should never, ever pass a vote.  Thanks.

Yesterday Matt called my attention to the bizarre fact that somehow P2 has been identified as one of the (three!) best political blogs in PA by the Washington Post.

Sure, we do our best (well, maybe we don’t always do our best — we come and go in fits and starts, really) — but imho I don’t think we quite deserve to be so singled out, when there are so many other excellent political blogs, many run by people who’re much more diligent than we are. 

See our blogroll for some of them.

This might be a good time to mention that if you’ve always thought you’d like to blog for P2, you should drop us a line and let us know why — we can hook you up with the tools of the trade.

Meanwhile – thanks to whatever kind readers out there sent our info along to the Post!  We’ll try to live up to the honor!

Geeks like me who were following closely what the state was doing to solve our transportation funding crisis last year looked at Act 44 and saw a loose collection of half-assed solutions mixed in with a few new problems. Bond financing, tolling I-80, blah blah blah — not enough money to solve the real crisis, and it’ll run out relatively quickly, but whatever: it’s new money, we really need it, and no alternative option had any legs.

What we didn’t see was the little clause permitting the Turnpike to pick toll-payers’ pockets at will to build as many of their boondoggle extension projects as they want. (See this document, page 3.) On Monday, the Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission is scheduled to meet to decide whether or not they’ll permit the Turnpike to raise $1.5 billion in new toll revenue from I-76 in order to build the 12-odd miles of the Southern Beltway connecting US22 to I79.

Wait, you say, I thought the SPC had to shelve $19 billion in unmet basic maintenance and operations needs for roads, bridges and public transit in our 10-county region in the last long-range plan? How does the Turnpike get to waltz in and build an expensive new-capacity project where we don’t need it?

Mais facilement, replies the Turnpike Commission: we’ll just hike tolls on I-80 to fund new bonds. No federal or state taxes need be levied. No harm, no foul!

But the thing is, of course, that even if the money to build the SO.B. isn’t coming out of SPC’s federal budget, any future connections to the road would have to fall on SPC’s shoulders — nevermind the additional wear and tear that all the new traffic on the SO.B. would put on existing state and county roads. Sprawl is expensive, there’s just no way around that.

Everyone who’s sent a note deploring this move to the SPC’s new chairman, Dan Onorato, has received a boilerplate email in response saying thanks so much for your opinion, and by the way Dan is a huge fan of the Pittsburgh leg of the Mon-Fayette. WTF? Sure the two projects are related, inasmuch as they’re both dumb road projects under the Turnpike’s control, but last time I checked the sections in question don’t even touch — and it’s pretty unlikely that drivers on the one will also be using the other. No brownfields are served by the SO.B. Can’t even pretend that it’s good for re-development — heck, it’s plowing through totally undeveloped greenspace.

What’s more, the Turnpike is flying totally under the radar with this. The comment period for this proposal straddled Christmas, New Year’s and MLK day; media coverage has been almost nil; and Onorato and several other key commissioners aren’t even planning to be at Monday’s meeting.

If you have some extra time, though, it could be more entertaining than your average SPC meeting.

4:30 pm
Regional Enterprise Tower (425 Sixth Ave.)
31st Floor

Come early, sign up for your rightful 3 minutes and let the commissioners know how you feel about this sneaky, underhanded and wrong-headed move.

If you can’t make it, you can always take action through PennFuture’s website. Click here to send an email to your reps.

Without going too overboard on our now-elected mayor’s shortcomings (and hey, what human being doesn’t have a few flaws), it seems to me that yesterday’s election proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Pittsburgh Dems could run a stuffed panda bear in the general and beat any candidate the Republicans could offer.  I’m with Pittgirl – the old ladies who vote in every election in this town would never, ever vote anything but Democrat, and the Dems can (and do) take that to the bank.

The thing is, I really think that’s not good news for the Democratic Party in Pittsburgh.  We spend all our time either fighting each other (as in, tooth and nail in the primary) or not fighting at all (as in, cakewalking through November).  There’s no opportunity to really develop any kind of policy or message or coherent platform or any of that other tiresome political garbage that – ahem! – we effing NEED in order to lead a major city that’s in dire fiscal straits in no small part because of weak leadership of the past.  All the ACDC does here is skate by on organizing that was done 50 years ago.  There is ZERO effort put into building up the party in any meaningful way that could secure its support and health once those dear old ladies stop being able to see us through every election.

‘Democrat’ here is really nothing but a brand name.  The product maybe used to be high-quality, or at least crafted locally — but now it’s a cheap import with loose stitching.  We’re so label-conscious.  What about the real goods, here?

Anyone catch this little article in today’s Post-Gazette?

The Pittsburgh Public Schools will drop “public” from its name and adopt a new, standardized way of referring to its schools as part of a campaign to brighten and strengthen the district’s image.

For example, Schenley High School will be called Pittsburgh Schenley.

God knows the word “public” is such a dark stain on the image of the Pittsburgh Public Schools — why remind people, after all, that these schools are organized by statute to provide education to all Pittsburgh children regardless of race/class/creed or even disability or behavioral problem.  Basically, the only reason the PPS can turn you away is if you show up at the front door with a knife or a gun.  Who wants to be reminded about that?  Or, god forbid, the fact that these schools are supported with public money?

No, it’s best to think of them as a kind of civic boosterism, brought to you by the PDP and the Allegheny Conference.  Pittsburgh Schools ROAR as they celebrate glass!  Or something.

Because I care about transportation funding in our fair commonwealth, I’ve been checking in with the transportation committee schedules in Harrisburg to see what kinds of proposals they’re debating.  Anyone want to hazard a guess?  Today the Senate Transportation Committee is considering 9 bills:  SB646, SB857, SB972, HB363, HB781, HB840, HB892, HB1169 and HB1228.  Only one of them concerns transportation funding (SB646) – and that is only authorizing $75 million in supplemental funding for public transit, a one-time band-aid application for a set of systems that are suffering major internal hemorrhaging.  Another, SB857, directs the state’s auditor-general to conduct annual audits of public transit authorities and to condition state funding on performance.  The rest?  Bills proposing that various stretches of state highway and bridges be re-named for sundry veterans.

Cue Nero.  Am I on crack, or are we facing a major transportation funding crisis in Pennsylvania, one that’s been in the spotlight lately, you may have heard about it - ?  Why are we taking these precious moments in – ahem -  MID JUNE to discuss re-naming a bridge on Route 30, when we still don’t have a viable plan to cover budget gaps at PennDOT and the transit authorities?

Senator Fumo (D-Phila) announced his transportation funding proposal yesterday — giving the Turnpike the task of raising money through tolls and bonds to provide $800 million for transit and PennDOT.  What good is that, exactly?  Why make it $800 million, when the Transportation Funding & Reform Commission recommended we’d need at least $1.7 billion to meet very basic operating and infrastructure maintenance needs?

While we’re on the subject, I encourage you all to take a gander at the Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission’s draft long range plan, which is up for public comment through Thursday.  (Send your comments to them here.)  The projected shortfall in our 10-county region just for basic highway and bridge maintenance and public transit operations through 2035?  $19.8 billion.  That’s assuming tax revenue will keep pace with inflation, and increase about 3% a year.  No new capacity, no new construction or service of any kind — just keeping up with what we already have.  Almost $20 billion.

To the SPC’s credit, they’ve taken the Mon-Fayette projects off the long range plan, at last, recognizing that there just ain’t no money to build them.  Part of me is worried that someone in Harrisburg will pull a fast one in the next few weeks and insert new funding for the MFX into a bill somewhere where no one will notice.  But then, it’d be hard to hide $5 billion behind the re-designation of that stretch of Route 322, dontcha think?

The Pittsburgh Planning Commission is holding a public hearing regarding the Pittsburgh North Shore Casino on Tuesday, May 1, 2007. They need to hear from folks to make sure the Master Development Plan contributes to sustainable development in Pittsburgh — and includes public input. 

E-mail your comments to Dolores.Hanna@city.pittsburgh.pa.us and request that your comments be given to the Planning Commission in advance of their Tuesday, May 1 public hearing. Or plan to attend the hearing yourself:  2:00 p.m. May 1st, 200 Ross Street (1st Floor). Each person will be given two minutes to speak, or three minutes if you are speaking on behalf of an organization (why orgs get more time than individuals, I don’t know). You should bring copies of your comments if possible, but they won’t flunk you if you forget.

Some stuff to consider: 

• The Casino will have an impact on the North Shore Riverfront Trail — we need to make sure that impact is friendly, and that public access to the trail is preserved.  Major public investment in the form of Growing Greener, Sports & Exhibition Authority, and Department of Economic and Community Development dollars have gone into the creation of the Riverfront Park and Trail. The Majestic Star Casino should be required to play nice.

• Pittsburgh is a national leader in green architecture. The Planning Commission should require that this project seek to achieve the highest possible energy efficiency and sustainable design criteria possible. We have an opportunity to add to Pittsburgh’s green profile by setting a national example with this project.

• The project should ensure access to public transportation (!), and make certain traffic isn’t going to menace pedestrians and the surrounding area.

• This project is on the riverfront, and should include intelligent stormwater management controls.

• The Planning Commission should establish public participation processes for increased public input and feedback on this and other large-scale development projects, such as the future hockey arena project.  (Hey, we can always dream, right?) 

E-mail your comments in the BODY of your message, not as an attachment, no later than MAY 1 to: Dolores.Hanna@city.pittsburgh.pa.us, or fax to 412-255-2838.  FYI, the planning commision are: http://www.city.pittsburgh.pa.us/cp/html/planning_commission.html#planning_commission_members

More details will be forthcoming in tomorrow’s Post Gazette, but meanwhile in the web edition today Joe Grata is reporting that the Turnpike Commission has upped their price estimate for the Pittsburgh leg of the Mon-Fayette, and that under the most optimistic circumstances construction wouldn’t be completed for another 10 years (even should the money they need — now $3.6 billion for the Pittsburgh leg alone — materialize tomorrow).  My favorite quote from the article:

David Zazworsky, special consultant to the turnpike for the expansion project, discussed the latest hurdles facing completion of the second largest new-highway-construction project in the United States.

“It hit home when I (recently) read about the population losses in Allegheny County,” he said. “What would help reverse that loss more than any other thing would be completing this project,” the northern link in the 70-mile highway now about half built in the Monongahela River corridor south to the West Virginia border.

Like, holy moronic failure to understand regional engines for growth, Batman.  How do you figure that a big project that’s designed to be a glorified driveway out of the city into the southern suburbs is going to reverse population loss in Allegheny County?  And:  how do you square spending $3.6 billion (which, if you figure in the debt service they’d have to pay on the bonds they’d float for it, would probably be closer to $7 or $8 billion) on this project, when basic infrastructure (streets and bridges, water mains, gas mains, sewer lines) is crumbling all over the place?  Sure THAT’ll bring folks back to Allegheny County.  What’s Zazworsky on?

Yo:  so the Pennsylvania Senate is threatening to block re-appointment of PA DEP Secretary Kathleen McGinty.  This is a big deal, and everyone needs to take a moment here to send urgent emails to their senators letting them know how wack this idea is.  Here’s PennFuture’s press release on the subject; click here to find your state senator’s contact information and tell them in your own words how important it is to keep McGinty and PA DCNR Secretary Mike DiBernardinis.  CALL THEM.  Call them NOW.

Katie McGinty is an awesome ball-of-fire advocate for the environment in PA – a friend of Al, a big advocate for Pennsylvania green businesses and renewable energy, the driving force behind PA adopting California emissions standards – and imho one of the best things Rendell has ever done for Pennsylvania is appoint her Secretary of the DEP.  She’s pissed off all the right people, naturally.  Now they’re out for her blood.

Today is the deadline for the Senate to take action on her nomination for re-appointment, and it’s not looking good.  Please take a moment to contact your senator to let them know it’s important to keep McGinty on.

Conservation Consultants Inc. is a regional non-profit dedicated to responsible energy use in homes and other buildings.  CCI offers a wide range of energy consulting services to improve energy efficiency and comfort in new and existing buildings.  CCI has partnered with many of the region’s energy utilities to administer their customer assistance and usage reduction programs.  Headquartered at the USGBC LEED-EB Gold office space known as the CCI Center, CCI has become a centerpiece for energy conservation education in the Pittsburgh region.