By Eve Picker
http://www.utterly-opinionated.com/?cat=8
This lovely little city, Pittsburgh, is under siege. Every day the media describes yet another crisis. Eight more schools to close. Library branches to be shuttered. A court order to fix the water and sewer system. Underfunded pension funds. Property and business taxes that are burdensome. Disappearing bus stops. Disappearing mail boxes. And the latest, a mayor who wants to tax our local college students to balance the city’s books.
Someone has been asleep at the wheel.
It has been decades now since Pittsburgh’s population was halved. Any sensible person would surely understand that half the people + the same number of services = disaster?
For the past decade the question in my head has become louder, more strident. Where is the leadership who will say it the way it is? Where is the leadership that will prepare it’s citizens for reality?
A leader should look like this. She should prepare her city’s citizens for the strategy that must be thought through – a shrinking city strategy. She should find ways to consolidate the city’s citizenry, to consolidate services. She should have the courage to say that upfront. She should focus on how to grow the city. And she should share the plan so that her citizens will understand that there will be pain, but there is also hope. She should know that cities are the future and that Pittsburgh will grow again.
Neither the head of the library system nor the superintendent of the public schools are to blame for the situations they inherited. Audits, anger and outrage will not change that fact.
