Sunday, November 16, 2003

Dear Saint Expeditus: How ya doin'? I stumbled across you while checking the Internet for patron saints. (Who'd have thought a kid from the Roman Empire would wind up there, eh?) My goal was to see if any saints could help Pittsburgh out of its fix. I've always liked the division of labor you guys have.

I thought about contacting Anthony, the patron saint of lost objects, to see if he might find where the vision in Harrisburg went, but he had his hands full finding my keys.

Then I thought about Jude, patron saint of lost causes, but that's too dramatic. Pittsburgh isn't Beirut, circa 1975. I likewise passed on Matthew the apostle, patron saint of tax collectors, because nobody's buying a saintly tax collector. That's when I finally got to you, Expeditus, patron saint of procrastinators.

You'd love Pennsylvania, Expy. Pittsburgh has a mayor who hasn't gotten around to balancing a budget in two years. The state Legislature can't get one done either. And we now face a reckoning for decades of putting things off.

The rest of America seemed to catch on years ago that the auto age changed everything. A half-dozen metro areas have merged in some way since the 1950s. Other cities have annexed their suburbs. Ohio has people pay income taxes to the communities in which they work. The Twin Cities and their surrounding suburbs in Minnesota came up with a system of regional tax-base sharing that has helped cities and suburbs alike.

Not here. Here, in the most fragmented region on Earth, we still practice the same beggar-your-neighbor politics we always have. We try Band-Aids instead of major surgery. Take, for example, the occupational privilege tax.

The name itself seems designed to tick you off. A job is no privilege. It's work. But since hardly anyone works where they live anymore, all but a dozen of the 130 municipalities in Allegheny County charge 10 bucks a year to jobholders within their borders.

This tax was introduced almost four decades ago, when the minimum hourly wage was less than a good cup of coffee is today. The city would like to see this tax go up to something like a buck a week, which is about where it would be if it had been tied to inflation.

Seems fair. I make my money in your community, I kick in something for traffic lights, fire and police protection, wear on the streets, snow removal and such. You work in mine and it's the same deal. Pittsburgh gets less than 1 percent of its budget from this tax, but in a city where the biggest employers, the hospitals and universities, pay no property taxes, every dollar counts.

Here's the thing nobody seems to get, though. Big suburban job centers, Robinson, Monroeville and Green Tree among them, get back more dollars per resident from this tax than the city does.

Alexander Ropelewski, a Republican supervisor from Moon, has pointed out eight municipalities benefit more per capita than Pittsburgh. Divide revenue by population and Findlay gets about $27 per resident from the occupation tax, and Pittsburgh less than $10.

Communities such as West Mifflin, Bethel Park and Ross also would benefit if their occupation taxes went to $5 a month. Residents would be out the cost of a diner tip each week, but their hometowns would have at least a half-million dollars more for infrastructure and police. I think I'd take that deal even if I did run the risk of making the place where I earned my living a marginally better place to be.

Here's the kicker, though, Expy. We've waited so long to get around to this that it won't, by itself, solve the problem of a small city pretending to be a metropolis. Even if this went to five bucks a month, that's only another $15 million to $16 million for a city budget that's $42 million out of whack. There have been massive layoffs and more must come. The state still won't do anything about all the loopholes in the business taxes, which exclude the largest for-profit businesses in town: finance, utilities, manufacturing and, yes, newspapers.

It's enough to get even a saint screaming. Have we put this off too long, Expeditus? Is St. Jude busy?

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