Now its the County's turn to strip PAT (Pittsburgh, Penn: salaries, live)

[Blackbeauty212]

Gotta love Politics - No one give a **** about the people, its Partisan Politics....Get ready to gas up those guzzlers because PAT is history...

Allegheny County may reduce transit subsidies - Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

[pman]

the state should increase the local match

[BrianTH]

That's a dangerous game Burn wants to play. Corbett's budget proposal suggests he has absolutely no intention to do anything to address the state cuts in public transit funding, at least not voluntarily. In general, if the County tries to hold the economy of the Pittsburgh Metro hostage in order to force the state to restore the transit funding, Corbett and his allies might tell them to go ahead and shoot.

[raubre]

Once again. I give up. I have no faith in our local government or public transit. It's an embarrassment.

[BrianTH]

Originally Posted by raubre

Once again. I give up. I have no faith in our local government or public transit. It's an embarrassment.

Did you mean to omit the state? Because this latest crisis is really entirely the state's fault.

[RedBall]

This is good news.

[pman]

Originally Posted by BrianTH

That's a dangerous game Burn wants to play. Corbett's budget proposal suggests he has absolutely no intention to do anything to address the state cuts in public transit funding, at least not voluntarily. In general, if the County tries to hold the economy of the Pittsburgh Metro hostage in order to force the state to restore the transit funding, Corbett and his allies might tell them to go ahead and shoot.

it basically says the county doesn't care about transit if someone else isn't paying for it.

[BrianTH]

Originally Posted by pman

it basically says the county doesn't care about transit if someone else isn't paying for it.

Nonsense. Allegheny County pays way more in revenues into the state than it gets back in return. Corbett and his allies want to shift that balance even more, and cutting funds for transit is one of the ways they can accomplish that.

I'd be fine with much more local funding of transit IF the state also returned a bunch of the money it was taking from us to spend elsewhere. But that isn't the deal Corbett and his allies are offering, and I can kinda understand why Burn wants to make what they are trying to do as clear as possible. The problem is they have the power to keep raiding our pockets as much as they want, at least until the next election.

[soniqV]

Originally Posted by BrianTH

Did you mean to omit the state? Because this latest crisis is really entirely the state's fault.

Until this story, right?

Originally Posted by RedBall

This is good news.

Agreed. The longer we kick this can down the road, the tougher the decisions are going to be and the costlier it will become to the taxpayers.

The day of reckoning is here.

Time to start thinking outside the box, about sustainable business models.

There's a charter company that wants to take over the dropped North Hills lines and charge fair market price, because they feel that the demand is still there. Not only that, they think they can actually turn a profit. Naturally the union is fighting this, even though they themselves are unwilling (or more likely unable in their own minds) to provide service.

Yes, PAT is not technically a total monopoly what with MMVTA and few other little guys, but that is textbook behavior of a de facto monopoly.

The problem, and this is the core of labor controversy around the country, is that the unions always put legacy costs before operating costs. And who can blame them, they were promised it after all. They've paid into it. But at some point people are going to have to get realistic and accept that the government has been irresponsible with money for too long, and is not going to be able to deliver on those promises. And the more they try to, the more that money has to come from somewhere else.

This is a reality that the majority of American workers are already facing. Time for the unions to realize they are not excepted.

Sure, you can complain that the state is being tougher on public transportation than PennDOT, but their days are numbered too. They face the same problems on an even bigger scale, and the bigger they are the harder they fall... and it will eventually fall.

The days of upper-5 and 6 figure salaries (with benefits figured in) to drive a bus, plus a pension plan a private sector worker could only dream of, are over. And eventually the days of $27/hr to flip a stop sign will be too. As well as every other bureaucratic institution that thinks it doesn't need to conduct its business like a business.

If organized labor in the public sector has any hope of saving itself, it MUST accept these realities.

[grimacista]

Does this mean that the staff at the upper station on the incline is going to be reduced from 7 to 2 in the mornings?