Both Sides Submit Drink Tax Questions for Voters

August 18th, 2008, posted by Greg Palmer

Both sides in the fight over Allegheny County’s 10 percent drink tax submitted potential referendum questions to the county elections office last week, but whether both initiatives will make it onto the November ballot is not a certainty.

That is because the county’s administrative code gives both groups — restaurateurs and bar owners who want to reduce the drink tax and a group of attorneys and property owners who want to sustain it as is — equal chances to kill each other’s referendum proposal before it even gets to the ballot.

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Pittsburgh

What was NOT on either

On August 19th, 2008 Anonymous said:

What was NOT on either ballot: “Should the Port Authority Transit be privatized to lower costs and reduce taxes.”
The County, and Mr. Onorato, are under the thumb of a few thousand union workers. They actually run the County, Mr. Onorato is just a figurehead.

Union busting

On August 19th, 2008 piltdownman said:

The glib way in which you trash unions is illustrative. Those unions exist to make sure that people get a livable wage. That’s not to say that some unions don’t abuse their power, both with their membership as well as in the negotiating process, but what we’ve seen over the past 25 years is the systematic dismantling of unions, which has left most workers with absolutely no recourse. They work at-will in a shrinking job market operated by massive corporations who desire nothing more than to cut their costs and boost their stock prices…and the losers are generally laborers.

I think the main reason so many people get annoyed with unions is that they are jealous of those lucky ones who still have someone fighting for them and getting them decent pay and benefits.

Instead of union busting, we should be looking at union building…

Pilt

Every industry that’s

On August 19th, 2008 Anonymous said:

Every industry that’s been unionized has gone down the tubes. Steel, Coal, Autos.
Unions just screw things up, but no one notices in the public sector, where they just ravage all of us.
As long as Mr. Onorato and the County Council (what a wasted bag of wind) obey every union dictate, Allegheny County will follow Pittsburgh into the fiscal black hole caused by out of control unions.

Every industry in the US has gone down that road...

On August 19th, 2008 piltdownman said:

..and it wasn’t the fault of unions.

If you want steelworkers or autoworkers to get paid what their brethren do in Asian, then fine, have at it.

What is “out of control” is the way greedy corporations have decimated the US job market while padding their personal bankrolls; laughing all the way to the bank.

Pilt