Author: breen

You know progress pittsburgh. Join us for a happy hour (or two) on Tuesday, September 16th to celebrate the creation of P2PAC.

P2PAC is a political action committee that supports candidates whose districts touch the City of Pittsburgh and whose agendas are consistent with its mission: good government, sustainable development, and social equity. P2PAC endorses candidates who meet these criteria and provides resources to advance their leadership. We see leadership as the primary vehicle for positive change in service of our mission.

We are ready to see change in local government and hope that you are too. Please join us for some beverages and conversation.

Who: YOU!
What: cocktails and conversation
Where: Double Wide Grill (East Carson and 24th Streets)
When: 09/16/08 @ 5:30* p.m.
Why: because Pittsburgh deserves better

We will be requesting a $5 donation at the door; all funds raised go straight to the PAC.

*Double Wide’s happy hour specials run until 6pm, so get there early!

After a long and persistent effort, residents of the Hill District, united under the One Hill Coalition, finally received a community benefits agreement signed by local elected leadership. This is a very positive step toward more sustainable development in Pittsburgh; CBAs provide a vehicle for community input into large scale development.

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This new online tool allows citizens to contribute ideas and information to an interactive plan for Pittsburgh’s future. The current topic of the wiki is transportation.

Please visit Pittsburgh Wiki and add your $0.02. The transportation wiki will be available for contributions until October 24, 2008. At that time, it will be closed and put into plan format for distribution to key decision-makers.

Pop City and cityLIVE! have partnered to make this project happen. Read more in this week’s Pop City here.

There’s a guy in Youngstown, Ohio, named Phil Kidd who leads a community organizing movement called Defend Youngstown but he also works for city government there and what’s remarkable is that he runs another blog to make his work activites public: 44503 LIVE. This guy actually submits his time sheet to the world. Now, that’s accountability and transparency. If only…

Many a Pittsburgh resident has seen the sad shape of Pittsburgh’s Uptown (a.k.a. Soho) neighborhood today. It’s sprinkling of old buildings awash in a sea of parking lots. And all of those parking lots are owned by one man, Sal Williams. Many a community advocate has been puzzled and stymied by this accumulation of parking lots. An article in the Pittsburgh Business Times indicates that more parking lots (i.e. further destruction of the Pittsburgh urban fabric) are on their way.

http://nullspace2.blogspot.com/2008/06/parsing-primary.html

by Chris Briem

So, I suppose it’s time to parse the primary data a little bit more. The problem with looking too deeply at the results from April is that there isn’t anything to really compare the voting patterns to. The obvious comparison to the spring 2008 primary would be results from the spring 2004 primary which was the last presidential cycle. The problem of course is that in 2004, the primary had been locked up by the time the Pennsylvania primary came around. Contrast that with 2008, and no matter whether you thought the electoral results were already won by BO, the media played up the whole election as the biggest presidential primary in Pennsylvania ever Given that, any comparison of the two elections (2004 vs. 2008) is by definition an overinterpretation. Nonetheless, maybe there is something to glean from comparing the two elections. (more…)

Today, Governor Ed Rendell signed the recently passed smoking ban into law (link). The state-wide ban will take effect in 90 days, or on September 11, 2008. Get ready to breathe easy.

Finally, after much to do, the Pennsylvania General Assembly has passed a smoking ban. A compromise bill, devised by a Conference Committee of House and Senate Democrats and Republicans, passed the House last week and passed the Senate yesterday on its second consideration. The new bill bans smoking in public places but includes a host of exceptions. (more…)

Pittsburgh is featured in a recent series on grist.com. I think that this article provides a very fair assessment of Pittsburgh’s “greenness”:

The Smoky City has become a poster child of sorts for urban revitalization, although it still hasn’t achieved the eco-notoriety of larger metropolitan areas. As home to the nonprofit Green Building Alliance, Pennsylvania’s second-largest city has seen a boom in sustainable development, and it’s been hailed as a leader of the green-building movement — ranking third in the number of green buildings in the U.S., just behind Portland and Seattle. Efforts to redevelop riverfront brownfields have met with some success, and the city has gained new attention for its recreation access. But the challenges of its post-industrial legacy remain: The city was recently given the dubious honor of worst air quality in the nation, and sprawl is an ever-looming foe. Pittsburgh may no longer be “hell with the lid off,” as it was once dubbed, but residents and advocates acknowledge that it seems to linger in a sort of purgatory.

Yesterday, City Council approved the distribution of public dollars through a private foundation. Councilor Ricky Burgess is planning to funnel funds allocated to his district through the Poise Foundation. For more details, see this article.

What does everyone think of this strategy in terms of accountability? It seems like a good idea to take the politics out of funding and evaluate applications based on merit. However, is it problematic to turn public funds over to a private organization for distribution? Do we need to or should we just expect a higher standard of evaluation from our public institutions?

Pittsburgh’s political leadership might be less progressive than we would like but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t progress in Pittsburgh. The contemporary environmental movement (also known as “being green”) has seen a lot of activity in Pittsburgh. When recently asked what I could recommend for a field trip for second graders learning about “green,” I had trouble focusing my answer: (more…)

“Closing in…the Pennsylvania Primary is two weeks from today and Quinnipiac University’s now says Obama is down 6 to Clinton from 9 on April 2nd…”

“$40-million-plus tumbled into the Barak Obama campaign in March…that is more than raised by Hillary Clinton ($20-million) and John McCain ($15-million) combined…”

(from today’s Harrisburg Online)

The mayor has selected new round of appointments for City Boards and Commissions. In addition to the usual selections from within his own staff, Ravenstahl has reached across the ever-widening administrative-legislative divide to appoint each of the newly elected Councilors- Burgess, Dowd and Kraus- to a position. Most notably, the mayor has removed loyalist Tonya Payne from the URA Board and replaced her with Ricky Burgess (Payne has been moved to the Housing Authority). For more information, check out Rich Lord’s article from last evening.

In today’s Post-Gazette, Rich Lord takes a critical look at the merger proposal, highlighting that:

“Neither the 21-page report they presented nor a 60-page RAND Corp. study that backs it dare to predict cost savings or a miracle turnaround. RAND’s researchers wrote that they could not find ‘an incontrovertible case for the link between consolidation and economic development.’”

At a press conference today, Ravenstahl and Onorato announced their joint support for city-county consolidation in Pittsburgh/Allegheny County (view report here). For further discussion of the issues involved in such a merger, I refer to a previous post written when the committee was formed to explore the issue:

“This is a mediocre solution that panders to municipalities that feel their power threatened by discussions of real regionalism, sacrifices the City of Pittsburgh’s government for cost savings and doesn’t provide any significant promise for improved quality of life in the region.”

Where do we go from here? The Post-Gazette’s coverage provides the following information on next steps:

“Leaders will go to Harrisburg later this month to start lobbying for enabling legislation to permit a referendum. If legislation is approved permitting a referendum, then the proposal would have to be approved separately by voters in the city and county.”

So, back to us. The projected implementation of a merger would be in 2009. That doesn’t leave much time for people to organize around their positions so we better get going.

What do you think? Is city-county consolidation a good idea? I say…only if we can call it Pittsburgh County.