Two days after 68,500 Pittsburghers voted to determine who gets to be mayor, four guys who hold real power sat behind a table in City Council chambers.

The four state senators from Allegheny County do not, by themselves, hold enough power to turn the city around. There are 249 other lawmakers in the state Legislature with something to say, too. But as the hearing by the state Senate Urban Affairs and Housing Committee made clear, Mayor Luke Ravenstahl is not entirely the master of his own fate.

Do you think the hospitals and universities should be kicking in more to pay for cops, firefighters, ambulances and such?

That would require changing a 10-year-old state law that stripped away the leverage the cities had to get payments from non-profits in lieu of taxes.

Since the city has cut 1,000 jobs, about a quarter of its work force, since 2002, is it time to tighten workers' compensation payments that cost millions?

However you answer that loaded question, workers' compensation is in the hands of Harrisburg lawmakers, too.

The relative inconsequence of any mayor compared with the state was the background noise of this hearing on Act 47, the state system that is supposed to stop Pennsylvania cities from circling the drain.

That system is looking like the Roach Motel: Cities check in but they don't check out. Nine cities and boroughs have been flying the Act 47 distress flag for at least 15 years -- Scranton, the state's sixth-largest city, among them.

No city has ever escaped the designation, though six boroughs have. Homestead emerged last spring after 14 years of official distress. (For policy wonks scoring at home, Ambridge has the record for shortest stretch, spending only three years in fiscal palookaville in the early '90s.)

The wonder is that more Pennsylvania cities don't topple because their set-up has been exactly wrong for a half-century. Even the city's fiercest critics unintentionally show that when they make comparisons.

Jake Haulk, president of the Allegheny Insitute for Public Policy, testified that Pittsburgh doesn't compare well with cities such as Omaha, Charlotte, Columbus and Salt Lake City.

But the smallest of those cities covers twice as much land as Pittsburgh's 55.5 square miles. Columbus and Charlotte have four and five times Pittsburgh's footprint. That's the key to survival in a commuter age: A city must capture where citizens make money and spend money for a stable tax base.

That's why Charlotte has annexed almost 250 square miles around it since 1950, making it nothing like the 30-square-mile city it once was. Omaha has annexed aggressively, too, while Columbus has quintupled its spread. Salt Lake City has merely doubled its land area, but the look of these auto-centric places is more like Allegheny County than the crowded city in its belly.

Pittsburgh, the city that has lost more than half its population since 1950, crowded? Well, Pittsburgh still has about 5,600 residents per square mile. That makes it more densely packed than the most crowded of the other four, Columbus and Omaha, which have but 3,400 per square mile. Pittsburgh would have more people per square mile even if it lost another 100,000 residents.

That seems to be the plan.

Those statistics didn't come up at the hearing. I got them when I Googled around later at the office, then pulled out a calculator. We should have no illusions that Pittsburgh will annex anything because not only is it too late, Pennsylvania law and politics make it impossible. The clout is in the suburbs, so the only response can be getting the county to start assuming more of the metropolitan load.

A shift from a city to a county police force seems a good bet at some point this century, but it's hardly on the radar now. There's a lot of fiddling around the edges of reform because the city's massive debt and pension burdens means any city-county marriage would come with an anti-dowry.

That won't be easy to figure out. Meantime, though, the state should realize that some of Pittsburgh's big non-profits are gold mines and their employees pay millions in state income taxes. It's time that Pennsylvania, like Connecticut and Rhode Island, reimburse cities for some of the property and business taxes they don't get for hosting the economic engines of the modern economy. Or get hospitals and universities to pony up as much as they do in Massachusetts cities.

It's either that or wait for $4-a-gallon gasoline to get commuters back to living close to where they work. Don't bet your Giant Eagle fuelperks on that.