I was going to save this post for Tuesday, but I figured better to get it out there and maybe someone can show me the error of my ways. I really hope there is something that I am just not understanding or seeing. Please correct me! Settle in folks, this is a long one:
First, raise your hand if you thought the drink tax was going to be used for the Port Authority? [Raises hand]. So were we duped? Here’s what we were greeted by yesterday
Since their enactment in 2008, Allegheny County’s taxes on alcoholic drinks and car rentals have done virtually nothing to ease the Port Authority’s chronic financial problems.
Here’s why: The new taxes were intended to help the county’s budget, not the Port Authority’s.
The taxes are generating less than $2 million per year in extra revenue for the authority while producing $30 million to $40 million windfalls that county government has used to avoid raising property taxes.
Well now. Then what about all of these:
Example one:
The Republican from Upper St. Clair said today the current levy is bringing in more revenue than the county needs to provide local matching funds to help support Port Authority buses and light-rail trains.
The tax has brought in $80 million for Port Authority operations.
He proposed the drink tax and a $2-a-day tax on car rentals last year to fund the county’s $30 million subsidy of the Port Authority
Given a choice between Allegheny County’s 10 percent drink tax or higher property taxes to fund Port Authority, Chris Pfefferman will choose the former. “Keep the drink tax,” said Pfefferman, 43, a Baldwin Borough homeowner who runs a Downtown newsstand.
This morning Common Pleas Judge Judith F. Olson set the date for arguments over an injunction that would prevent the county from spending its drink and car rental tax receipts on anything other than transit.
In what Allegheny County officials said was a massive blow to this year’s budget, a judge ruled yesterday that excess receipts from the county’s drink and car rental taxes can only be spent on the Port Authority.
County Chief Executive Dan Onorato, in the meantime, pledged to oppose efforts to defeat the tax, which was enacted along with a $2-per-day rental car tax Jan. 1 to raise about $30 million for the Port Authority.
In Act 44, they said you can have a drink tax and a car rental tax,” Onorato said. He said he faced the prospect of raising $30 million to $40 million more in property taxes for transit, and “I campaigned on not raising property taxes.”
Said Wagner, whose family owns a tavern: “There is no correlation between getting a drink and paying for the Port Authority.”
