The Allegheny Regional Asset District: communities thinking and acting like a region.

• Author: Turner, James W.
• Position: Allegheny County, Pennsylvania

In 1994, a governmental structure was launched in Allegheny County designed to fund the regional assets of southwestern Pennsylvania and to institute a long-overdue tax restructuring for the local governments within Allegheny County, including the City of Pittsburgh.

Landmark legislation enacted in 1993 permits Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, to levy a 1 percent local option sales tax and, at the same time, to create a new form of governance known as the Allegheny Regional Asset District. The enabling act, popularly known as the Regional Asset District bill, was the result of a two-year, intensive lobbying effort by the government officials from the City of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County combined with the private-sector leaders from the Allegheny Conference and the Greater Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce. The Allegheny County Commissioners officially took action on March 31, 1994, and the Allegheny Regional Asset District was born.

The Allegheny Regional Asset District (hereafter referred to as the District) is a special-purpose, areawide unit of local government created expressly for the purposes of supporting, financing, coordinating, and assuring the efficient and effective operation and development of regional assets. It has no taxation powers but does have the authority to disburse the funds allocated to it by law - 50 percent of the proceeds of the countywide 1 percent local option sales tax.

The Allegheny Regional Asset District distributes funding to the regional entities located within and serving Allegheny County, a 734-square-mile jurisdiction in southwestern Pennsylvania containing a population of 1,336,000 residents. The county encompasses 128 municipalities. The City of Pittsburgh, which covers 55 square miles and whose population is 370,000, constitutes the urban core of Allegheny County and is located totally within the county boundaries.

The District is governed by a seven-member "citizen" board, with the Governor of Pennsylvania having the power to appoint an eighth member in a nonvoting capacity. No member of the governing board can be an elected official, an appointed official, a party official, or a public employee; a member cannot even be a direct relative of an elected, appointed, or party official. Four of the appointments are made by the Allegheny County Commissioners and two appointments are made by the Mayor of the City of Pittsburgh, the center city of Allegheny County. Appointees serve terms commensurate with the terms of the appointing officials. The seventh voting member is then chosen by the other six members from a list of nominees provided by regional agencies within the area.

In designing this governing structure, the trade-off that legislators had to negotiate was between the accountability of elected officials via the ballot box versus the desire of the citizens to do things in a nonpolitical manner. The compromise was to insure that the District is citizen-based and therefore nonpolitical. Assuring a degree of accountability, given the fact that public funds are being disbursed, was the aim of this appointment structure.

The initiative that culminated in the creation of the District began in November 1991, when the Mayor of the City of Pittsburgh asked the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, a leading civic agency in southwestern Pennsylvania, to work with the leaders of the private sector to address the problem of funding the major regional assets of the area that benefit the entire community. After meeting with many of the major private and public leaders from the region, the Allegheny Conference proposed a legislative effort with five major policy objectives:

1) to improve and stabilize the funding for the regional assets of the community - "to preserve the area's crown jewels;"

2) to correct the funding inequities that existed at the time with respect to the center city - Pittsburgh;

3) to relieve the over-reliance on the property tax and selected nuisance taxes;

4) to reduce the fiscal disparities among the rich and poor of the county's local governments; and

5) to establish an important precedent for regional cooperation.

Each of these objectives was obtained with the passage of the legislation, the creation of the District and the levying of the local option sales tax by Allegheny County.

Preserving the Crown Jewels

The two principal beneficiaries of the Allegheny Regional Asset District are the...