Thank you for visiting my campaign website. The 24 second video above was Allegheny County Chief Executive Jim Roddey speaking about Dave on WQED-TV . As a County Republican, he couldn't endorse me but his words speak for themselves.
I entered the race recently when a project to which I was committed got postponed. I will be uploading more soon.
Please check back from time to time. You may also volunteer to help with the campaign by using the contact page link above.
Big money developers are set to pounce upon the City. The US Supreme Court decided decades ago that a city can take private properties and give them to developers for their purposes. That ability is in place with Pittsburgh’s URA which has used it many times since WWII. It can hit where you live too!
Real estate speculators (they call themselves “developers”) both inside and outside the city have been a deliberate tool of Pittsburgh’s elite. During WWII, the wealthiest individuals and heads of corporations formed the Allegheny Conference. By acting in unison to set and control the public policy, they sought to reinvent the region, replacing its blue collar working class culture with a white collar office class and its corporate culture. To effect the cultural cleansing, they pledged to use their political, social, and economic might to silence all opposition – any who spoke against them would be pulled aside and told that if they wanted to keep their jobs or business, they needed to go along to get along. Their main tool, an ambitious agenda (which also feathered their own nests financially) has mainly been based on real estate speculation.
The Conference began to dismantle the traditional urban landscape by letting neighborhoods deteriorate, using the URA to level them, and publicly subsidizing developers to build multi-block projects. The non-minority residents were lured to move to sprawling suburbs built by suburban speculators, their access made possible on new publicly funded highways. This process has made billions for the real estate speculation interests: the so-called “developers,” their contractors, consultants, suppliers, and the construction unions.
In the 1980’s the Conference decided to make the airport area into the region’s central business district, modeling it after Brasília, Brazil, the sprawling, unwalkable new capital of Brazil. In the 1990’s, a series of deliberate falsifications fraudulently diverted 40% ($12 Billion) of federal funding needed for minimum maintenance of the existing transportation infrastructure. It was used for new highways and interchanges to empty more people and investment from the city to the properties of suburban real estate speculators. That diversion of maintenance funding was also directly responsible for the Fern Hollow Bridge collapse.
The Southern Beltway is now open and the Mon-Fayette to Monroeville is underway. We can’t put that Genie back in its bottle, but there is one thing that could temper and potentially reverse the current out-migration that’s due to the policy of making the airport area the region’s new central business district:
Building a rapid rail connection from the city to the airport would create a less than 15 minute trip between them, making people closer to their plane in the city than at an airport parking lot. By effectively moving the airport into the city and not the other way around, it would bring new economic vitality to Downtown and District 2. The best prospect for a City-Airport rail terminal is a Southside parking lot next to the bridge used by the T. Another stop on the T line could be built into the new terminal, giving people Downtown an ability to get off the T and transfer for the quick trip to their plane. Being in proximity to the inclines, both Mt Washington and Duquesne Hts would be within walking distance. But speculators seem interested in using that site for something else. – It’s now or never for this opportunity!
For decades the Conference has been holding the region hostage, denying it quality rail transit because speculators expect billions in federal funding for MagLev, a magnetic levitation system 30 feet in the air from Greensburg to the City of Pittsburgh, then out to the airport going up the middle of a new turnpike to be built through District 2 neighborhoods.
Instead, if elected to City Council, I will pursue a readily buildable rapid-rail-to-the-airport connection utilizing a currently unused half of the rail line along the south shores of the Mon and Ohio Rivers. I did work upon such a viable proposal years ago. It can be done now!
