The City’s response to last week’s storm illustrated that government is better suited to making regulations and collecting tax dollars than it is to providing services. Although it’s important to praise the employees of the Departments of Public Works and Public Safety for their admirable efforts, it should be recognized that city politicians failed once again to prepare Pittsburgh for a major snowfall.

For instance, consider the fact that Pittsburgh’s road salt budget for 2010 is $559,640 – down $400,000 from last year. This drastic cut in the road salt budget may seem like a small issue to some readers but it is indicative of how government priorities differ from taxpayer priorities.

Importantly, road salt spending wasn’t reduced as part of an across-the-board budget reduction. City revenue for 2010 increased by more than $5.6 million and city expenditures increased by almost $10 million so we know that the cut in road salt spending wasn’t brought about by a fiscal crisis.

Indeed, the budget of the Department of Public Works Bureau of Operations – the bureau responsible for snow removal and road salt purchasing – is the only division of Public Works to have its budget cut this year.

But even though the city spent less on road salt, it still found the money to spend $264,554 on the Equal Opportunity Review Commission – that’s a $10,000 increase from last year and a $78,624 increase from 2008. The Commission’s website describes its purpose thus: “The Equal Opportunity Review Commission (EORC) assists Minority Business Enterprise / Women Business Enterprise (MBE/WBE) with prime contracting opportunities.”

Of course the Commission is a symptom of City regulations that require that “Contractors must make a ‘good faith effort’ to include minority- and women-owned businesses on City and County authority contracts.” Symptom or not, when the budget for a diversity commission goes up and the budget for road salt goes down, the whole city suffers.

But if you listened to city politicians, you’d never guess that the road salt budget was cut as government officials consistently promise that they will do better at snow removal in future years. For instance, after the city failed in the cleanup of another major February storm in 2008, Mayor Luke Ravenstahl declared a “War on Snow” and promised to do everything possible to “make sure the city does a better job keeping streets free of snow and ice,” the Post-Gazette reported.

Fast-forward to last week and the Mayor admitted that the city didn’t have enough resources to clear Pittsburgh streets just as he issued a call for private contractors to contact the city if they could help in the snow removal effort.

In criticizing the city’s response to the snow storm and the evident discrepancies between what politicians say when people are looking and how they construct a budget when people aren’t watching, it’s important to recognize the work of Public Works employees who did their best during the storm. These employees pulled 12 hour shifts to clear city streets but they were betrayed by a city government that doesn’t have its priorities straight.

The response to the storm and the conflict between the priorities of politicians and people demonstrates that we would do best to pay private firms to provide us with those services we previously thought of as necessarily governmental in scope. It would cost residents a great deal less to contract with a private firm to remove snow than it costs in taxes to the city because such a private firm wouldn’t spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a diversity commission.

I also suspect that no private firm would employ individuals like Shawn Beck, union steward for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 2719, who complained during the storm that city meter readers were being asked to shovel snow around city garages without “the training that they need to be shown how to properly shovel snow.”

The logistics of private firms being hired by individuals or neighborhoods to plow streets would have to be figured out but reducing snow removal to a private business transaction is at least worth a shot in light of the city’s absolute inability to cope with snowfall year after year. A private solution to snow removal would have the added benefit of allowing private citizens to set priorities and determine how their money is spent giving Pittsburghers control over a process that government consistently fails to execute efficiently.

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