Editorial: Mayor's plan needs more details

“We welcome more details on the mayor’s full plan.”

That’s what Highmark spokesman Aaron Billger said about Mayor Bill Peduto’s OnePGH idea.

We second that.

It’s not that we are critical of the plan or the goal. We don’t really have enough information to be critical.

The initiative wants to raise $3.5 billion over 12 years, and it wants to pump that money back into laudable areas like housing, education, art and the environment.

That sounds fantastic. Let’s make sure everyone can have a safe home. Let’s see every kid have a chance at preschool. Let’s beautify the city of Pittsburgh. Let’s clean the air and water. Let’s do it.

But…how?

The “how” is where OnePGH falls down a little.

“We are creating something that doesn’t exist today,” Peduto said. “This would be an organization that is created to be able to meet the critical needs of the neediest through a combined effort of government, corporations, institutions and foundations, the leadership of Pittsburgh.”

Again, that sounds great. Tell us more.

Peduto says the project has been under construction for a few years now and will start in earnest with the announcement of an administrative council that will work out those details. It’s just hard to make judgments about OnePGH without those salient points nailed down.

It does seem like an innovative solution to an issue of a city filled with big beautiful buildings that don’t generate tax dollars. Between world-class universities and groundbreaking medical facilities, not to mention churches and property owned by city, county, state and federal governments, 40 percent of Pittsburgh real estate doesn’t get a tax bill.

That’s a lot of money that isn’t paid into coffers which would then fund necessary projects. Many of those organizations make “payments in lieu of taxes,” but the mayor says OnePGH will generate more revenue.

But Highmark, UPMC and others are still waiting for those details and have not made commitments to the new endeavor.

“We’ve approached our foundations, hospitals, universities and corporations to partner with us and to be able to fill those (funding) gaps both through direct financial assistance and through strategic partnerships. They’ve all committed to be a part of it,” Peduto said.

That kind of cooperation is great out-of-the-box thinking. We don’t need to find ways to re-invent wheels that already work if we can get all of the wheels working on a vehicle headed in the right direction.

But the small amount of information on OnePGH just leads to lots of questions about the next step and the next step and the one after that, not the least of which will be about the transparency of the nonprofit that will handle all those annual contributions separate from city government.

It sounds like a good start. Now let’s get down to those details.