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to promote civic engagement in the Philadelphia region.PA Gov Sends Mixed Signals With $50,000 Boost for Bike Race
Monday, April 27th, 2009 at 4:32 pm - by Matt Campbell. Filed under: Budget, Community.
Bike race in the Manayunk-section of Philadelphia / Image credit: Matt Lehrer
I thought the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was facing an economic crisis.
In the past two months, the PA’s projected budget shortfall for next year jumped $300 million to a whooping total of $2.6 billion.
So, when the Governor Ed Rendell pledged an additional $50,000 in state money towards the bike race planned for Manayunk, I was shocked. It doesn’t make sense on two levels:
(1) The money that has been pledged to the race will go for VIP tickets to be given away to state workers. This at a time that Rendell plans to reduce by 20 percent the amount the commonwealth pays into a fund that administers health care benefits. Perhaps the state workers can use those tickets to inoculate themselves from the oncoming swine flu.
(2) This is additional public money that is going to an event that is partly in trouble because the City of Philadelphia can no longer afford to pay the extra costs (set-up, security, clean-up, among others) needed for these events.
Why did Rendell do it? I can only guess, but Rendell is a former Mayor of Philadelphia and one of the region’s biggest boosters as well as being a major sports nut. As such, it must cause him great pain to see that an event that is so well known throughout the cycling world could be threatened. Plus, maybe he thinks Manayunk’s reputation as a fun gathering spot needs a little stimulus of its own.
I am not opposed to the bike race in Manayunk. It is a good event. But was I the only one surprised by the commonwealth’s generous offer to buy $50,000 worth of VIP tickets for the bike race?
fyi: Organizers of the bike race say they are $400,000 short of their goal, and today was supposed to be the Go/No Go deadline. But KYW reports that they are extending this by one day because a potential donor has stepped forward and that could make all the difference.
April 28th, 2009 at 9:31 am
I think it means we cannot get a straight story out of our government regarding what is a financial crisis versus what is not a financial crisis. There are too many angles and too many conflicts of interest to know for sure what is what. So if things hang in the balance–libraries or a bike a race, for example–then it’s important to keep pushing your priorities because clearly the budget situation is actually quite flexible.
I was thinking about this after listening to this morning’s interview with Michael Nutter. I think the local govt’s are doing the right thing to join forces and consolidate the pensions. But it raises questions for me about just how fixed or restricted are the city’s true options during this crisis. It’s possible that the crisis is forcing creative approaches to chronic problems and that is a good thing. But the pension story and the bike race story say to me that other chronic problems are just waiting for better solutions and that we the residents/tax-payers should keep that in mind. We are being told that we are coping with problems that have no other solutions but to raise wage, sale, and property taxes (but not business taxes–that was a good question to the Mayor about Comcast btw). So I have decided to not believe them. We are in a very fluid, national/global situation that changes from day to day. This crisis is still playing itself out and these negotiations are ongoing, or at least they should be. More and better information is still needed. And this post is getting too long but I just want to say that healthcare reform is the other bouncing ball out there that has great potential to improve the City’s budget problems and I think we should focus on the high-yield impact of quality healthcare reform for closing the gaps–before putting the city’s residents in greater hardship through increased wage, sales, or property taxes. Ok! Back to work.
April 28th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
Take a second to click on the link in the above story that references Manayunk’s ‘Reputation as a fun gathering spot.’ It leads to a pretty nice video about Manayunk.