Swiftly on the heels of Mayor Yarone Zober’s appearance before the grand jury, Frontman Luke Ravenstahl is taking aim at federal prosecutors, saying he is preparing an aggressive defense of what may turn out to be theft-by-perks charges.
If that is what is up, Ravenstahl claims he was duly “ordered” to take bodyguards with him wherever he goes. The prosecution might argue that he himself appoints whichever Public Safety officials issue those orders, and may have selected them according to their willingness to let him utilize what he wanted, when he wanted, no questions asked — or else pressured them to do so afterwords.
However, that whole idea fails to explain a few things about the course of InvestigatePGH:
I don’t know the answers, but none of the above would be explained by one simple flag for “Excessive Use of the Bodyguards.”
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Future Mayor Bill Peduto
called attention to Philadelphia’s plan to develop the shoreline of the Delaware River, which calls for “high quality recreational, cultural and commercial activities” and “high quality investment in public parks and trails as well as maritime, residential, retail, hotel and other improvements”. In that order.
Yesterday’s workshop on
Inclusionary Zoning featured Frank Hammond of BNY Mellon describing how other areas have adopted legislation to encourage developers to provide more affordable housing: through bonuses for greater density, fast-tracking of certain permits and waivers of certain fees, alternative design standards, subsidies (the kind with strings actually attached) or tax abatements, and partnerships with public housing authorities. He also outlined several reasons that serious shares of honestly affordable housing is advantageous to developers, who are sometimes in a rush to maximize rents yet not necessarily thinking through of long-term implications. Bob Damewood of
Regional Housing Legal Services got into an analysis of
what the Penguins refer to as “affordable housing” in their proposal that is geared toward affluent young professionals — anticipating likely monthly rents between $1,000 and $1,500 even in that subcategory, and how this would price out almost all Pittsburgh-area African-Americans and the great majority of other Americans.
Meanwhile the Penguins are circulating as part of
their very own development plan a sketch of a
richly verdant deck over the Crosstown Expressway that they are not planning on building, nor cognizant of when benefactors might build such a thing for them (sometime after the
Garden Walkway, most likely).
