Publius Awakened

I’m willing to give credit where credit is due and for this reason I have to praise Mayor Ravenstahl for doing the right thing and vetoing the prevailing wage legislation passed by City Council almost two weeks ago. Passed unanimously by City Council, the prevailing wage legislation mandated that “workers in city-backed hotels, grocery stores, [...]

I haven’t spent much of winter break thinking about Pittsburgh politics but I do feel the need to write a brief piece on the conclusion of the Fair Share Tax debate if only because I spent so much time covering it on this blog and in The Pitt News.
First, just because city nonprofits came to [...]

As if Pitt using its website to ask people to vote in an online Post-Gazette poll about the Fair Share Tax wasn’t bad enough, the University issued an e-mail to student leaders on Thursday asking them to vote in the poll and encourage their membership to do the same.
Sent from Director of Student Life Kenyon [...]

The University of Pittsburgh’s involvement in the Fair Share Tax debate has struck me as somewhat dodgy over the past few weeks but their latest attempt to influence public policy is a little strange, desperate and inconsequential. Specifically, the University of Pittsburgh’s website – http://www.pitt.edu — is urging visitors to vote in the Post-Gazette’s online [...]

Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers President John Tarka is leading an initiative to change the way teachers are paid in Pittsburgh, the Post-Gazette reported. Specifically, Tarka is proposing to change the current system of seniority-based salaries to instead pay teachers based on performance.
The attempt to base teacher salaries on performance is sure to engender some intense [...]

Mayor Luke Ravenstahl delivered an ultimatum to Pittsburgh colleges and universities yesterday: Either agree to “voluntarily” contribute $5 million to the city of Pittsburgh by Monday or the City Council will pass the Fair Share Tax. In response, the Pennsylvania Council on Higher Education sent a four-page letter to the mayor that said, “[we] will [...]

Councilman Jim Motznik – a proponent of the Fair Share Tax – raised eyebrows nationally last week when he said, “These whores at the universities will end up taking more than 1 percent from the students,” the Post-Gazette reported today.
This statement – delivered during a televised City Council meeting – is absolutely true in the [...]

The University of Pittsburgh Student Government Board did something I agreed with Tuesday when it voted to deny Students for Life’s allocations request of $1,515 to pay for the group’s travel to the January March for Life.
I don’t believe that the student activities fee should go to pay for students to attend an anti-choice rally [...]

The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh will raise fines on overdue materials this January in an effort to offset its budget deficit, the Post-Gazette reported. The latest development in a months-long saga, the increase in fines is just one part of the institution’s attempt to stay afloat in the face of a $6 million budget deficit.
Technically [...]

Following a closed-door meeting with three local university presidents, Mayor Luke Ravenstahl requested another one-week delay in the vote on the Fair Share Tax, the Post-Gazette reported. With the vote delayed and rumors of a compromise in the works, some students may feel that they’ve dodged a financial bullet.
They’d be wrong.
While we were raising hell [...]