Editorial: Unconstitutional jock tax fallout could have been avoided

If you buy a flat screen TV in Pittsburgh, you pay 6% state sales tax and 1% Allegheny County sales tax.

No one asks you for your driver’s license to see where you are from and charges you another 5% for living outside the city limits. If they did, shoppers would raise a ruckus, wondering why they were being discriminated against for bringing their business into town.

That’s what happened with Pittsburgh’s “jock tax.”

The Sports Facility Usage Fee levied a 3% surcharge on athletes and performers who were doing their jobs at the city’s publicly underwritten venues like Acrisure Stadium, PNC Park and PPG Paints Arena.

But in 2019, the jock tax was challenged in the Allegheny County Common Pleas Court by some of those athletes paying the bill. It has ping-ponged through rulings and appeals ever since.

That ended Thursday with a final verdict from the Pennsylvania Supreme Court: the jock tax is unconstitutional.

The idea is that all people either pay the tax or don’t. You don’t have one cost for one group and one for others. The court dismissed the claim the city made in April, claiming the 3% just made up the difference residents pay in other taxes.

The tax itself is one issue. The city’s leaders clearly believed they were doing the right thing by levying it. Many government agencies do things in good faith that are later overturned when taken to court.

But since 2019, the city should have been preparing for this day.

First, they should have been making an active attempt to find a new — and constitutional — way to replace all the money it was making by shaving slivers off the paychecks of millionaires, ideally without penalizing Pittsburgh taxpayers. There has been six years to flex a little creative muscle and figure out a solution.

Instead, the city seems to have relied mostly on the Powerball theory of financial planning — just praying for a win.

But that isn’t the only problem. There is what this loss will cost in real cash.

Why? Because while this was playing out in court, the tax continued to be collected and factored into spending. This year’s budget anticipated $6.1 million as part of the $666 million spending plan, despite knowing there was not a guarantee of a win.

That could translate into millions that must be refunded.

“If that’s the case, now we’ve got big, big problems,” said Councilman Anthony Coghill, D-Beechview.

And yet Mayor Ed Gainey’s office seems to prefer to blame the people whose money was taken from them in defiance of law.

“This decision will further shift the cost burden of essential city services onto our residents, while reducing the responsibility of performers and professional athletes to contribute to covering the significant costs associated with large public events,” said spokeswoman Olga George.

The jock tax was not the fault of the Cleveland Browns or the New York Yankees or the Philadelphia Flyers. It wasn’t Taylor Swift’s fault. It can’t be put on anyone other than the people who passed the law approving it and the ones who have had six years to fix the problem and haven’t.