I'll let you in on a secret about column writing: Sometimes the story you really wanted to do, the one where you get to roam outside on a beautiful day, falls through. That's when you wind up writing about parking garages.

I don't like parking garages. I don't know anyone who does. So I was surprised at a recent semi-political dinner when I heard a celebrated Northern California landscape architect, Walter Hood, compliment local architect Rob Pfaffmann for his redesign of the garage at Sixth Street and Fort Duquesne Boulevard.

That's the blue one you can see, with selected panels lit up, when sitting in PNC Park and looking at the Golden Triangle across the Allegheny. Maybe you think, "As parking garages go, that's not half-bad. Now let's get some runs!"

That's about as far as it goes. It's not like you're going to put a poster of it on your office wall. All we really want out of parking garages is to get in and out as quickly and cheaply as possible.

That's why the "privatization" of the city's parking garages deserves more attention. Because it could wind up costing commuters.

Mayor Luke Ravenstahl is considering leasing the city's parking garages in order to shore up the pension fund, now sucking wind. It wasn't in great shape before the stock market crash, and now it has a fraction of what it should. At year's end, the pension fund contained $260 million, only about 29 percent of what it ought to have to cover obligations to retirees and future workers.

The mayor suggests that if the city leases the 11 Downtown garages, and perhaps neighborhood lots and street meters, it could get as much as $400 million upfront. That would be enough to pay off the garages' debt and make a huge dent in the pension shortfall. A Chicago consultant has been hired to make a recommendation on the potential sale by August, well after the May 19 mayoral primary.

What's being downplayed is that, in this case, getting the government out of the way will almost surely increase the cost of parking.

It's a revered Pittsburgh myth that the cost of parking is high because the parking tax is. But the parking tax has dropped from 50 to 37.5 percent in the past few years, yet parking fees in the private lots haven't budged.

With tens of thousands of commuters driving Downtown and to Oakland each workday, owners of private garages and lots continue to charge all the market will bear. The only garages that tamp down rates belong to the Pittsburgh Parking Authority.

So it's easy to guess what will happen if all the spaces go into private hands. The only way to get real value from the sale is to sell the garages with no rate cap. Otherwise, the return won't be as good and no real dent would be made in the pension problem.

You don't hear this much from the usual critics of government because that would mean acknowledging a public authority doing some good.

These pseudo-independent bodies set sewer rates and the parking fees to take political pressure off mayors and city councils, but they also can be brought in line.

When the state forced the city to lower the parking tax, the Parking Authority alone made concessions.

When the city remade Oakland's Schenley Plaza as a park, the authority gave up a lot of steady, reliable, money-making spaces; it's doing the same on the Mon Wharf, with construction for a riverfront park and bike trail under way. The successful retail revival in East Liberty was possible in part because the authority gave up lots at a price that would have made a private operator snicker.

Folks like to say they want government "run like a business" right up until the moment they turn around and say, "You're a government and you should be helping."

Councilman Patrick Dowd, one of the mayor's two challengers in the May primary, says the leasing of the garages would be a bad idea. Reasonable parking rates are critical in attracting and holding jobs in Downtown, he said.

So then where would he find the millions to fill the pension hole? He suggests that new money from the slots casino be dedicated solely to the pension fund and paying down city debt. He'd also dedicate any new sources of revenue -- if the courts force a reassessment of Allegheny County property taxes, for instance -- to those areas.

It's dubious whether there would be enough revenue to make much of a dent. There's no easy answer here, but those who despair of our region's hyper-fragmentation may soon have another reason to moan: Suburban commuters, the people most affected by any uptick in parking rates, have no vote in the mayoral election.