Sunday, August 24, 2003

I was having coffee in the US Steel Tower the other day when a fellow mentioned 8,000 people work in the place, and that it could hold as many as 10,000. That many folks go in and out each weekday regardless.

In other words, there are 101 communities in Allegheny County with fewer residents than the Steel Tower will see tomorrow.

That says more about this county than it does about the skyscraper. There are more municipalities in this county (130) than there are in Montana (129). Montana is 200 times our size. And though we have 40 percent more people than Montana, they've been catching up. Who hasn't been?

So I can't help wondering if having enough police chiefs to form a 10-team softball league and still leave bench strength is the most efficient way to be spending your tax money. I say "your" money because I live in the city. We waste ours in different ways. But the common element is our being tied to historical boundaries that don't work very well for Greater Pittsburgh anymore. The city's fiscal crisis has us actively engaged in a city-vs.-suburbs dialog, but that's neither productive nor the whole story. Pittsburgh is the most fragmented region in America.

It's a setup that makes it "rational to do the irrational," said John A. Powell of Ohio State University. "It's rational to not ever cooperate, to rob your neighbor."

So the city has what may be the highest parking tax in the nation -- 31 percent -- because that's the only way it has to get money from commuters who help this city of 328,000 become a city of about 600,000 every Monday morning.

City Council contemplates raising that tax "temporarily" to 39 percent to save jobs, i.e. their own. The 731 people laid off last month vote in the city, not the suburbs. So council members look for Band-Aids when surgery is necessary.

Mayor Tom Murphy says he'll block that increase. To do otherwise would play into the hands of our do-nothing state Legislature. As long as legislators have us believe these problems are entirely of the city's making, we may not notice that every city in the commonwealth struggles similarly, playing by rules that no longer work in a 21st-century economy.

Pittsburgh ponders more pink slips for people who are, by definition, city taxpayers.

Meantime, outside Pennsylvania in America proper, metropolitan areas have adjusted by merging city and county services in major ways.

Our fragmentation makes that harder. Have you ever taken a good, long look at a map of Allegheny County? I'd call it a patchwork quilt if that weren't such an insult to quilt makers. Our map looks like what you'd pull from a pizza box if the delivery man carried it sideways to your door.

Commuters routinely cross a half-dozen boundaries or more to and from work, largely because rich guys back in the industrial age wanted it this way. The little slices were designed to be self-supporting mill and factory towns. Now the mills are gone but the boundaries remain because every fiefdom has political brokers with stakes in the status quo who easily play on residents' fear of change.

If we were designing the county today, we'd do it differently. We wouldn't be duplicating services and wasting money at every turn. We'd have metropolitan services for metropolitan needs. We might still have 30 or 40 municipalities, but we wouldn't need more than Montana has.

Of course, the moment anyone begins this conversation, some lightweight politician in fear of a lost paycheck jumps out from behind a ward chairman and yells "Metropolitanism!" As if the pretense that this is not a metropolitan area will make the modern economy go away.

That leaves us to fight among ourselves because the boundaries make that seem rational. Commuters would have less problem paying for essential metropolitan services if they felt they had a voice in how those services are provided.

But that would take a lot more nimble thinking than any politicians, in or out of the city, have exhibited so far.

The city, for all its faults, is still the region's most prolific generator of jobs.

It remains the place where a single building can churn out 8,000 paychecks a week and still have room for more. But the city is only one piece in a much larger puzzle, and pretending otherwise has gotten us nowhere.

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