We Are Not Cutting Costs. We Are Consuming Our Inheritance.

Allegheny County’s pension crisis, deteriorating infrastructure, and the national demand for lower property taxes all reveal the same political failure: we want the benefits of a functioning society, but we increasingly refuse to pay the full cost of sustaining one.

Allegheny County is confronting a pension crisis that has been decades in the making. The County’s most recent actuarial valuation identifies approximately $1.4 billion in unfunded accrued pension liabilities, with assets sufficient to cover only about 40 percent of benefits already earned by current and former employees. A consultant retained by the Retirement Board has estimated that correcting the problem could require roughly $100 million in additional annual funding for the next 20 years.

Those numbers are alarming, but they did not appear overnight. There was no single year in which someone created a $1.4 billion liability. It accumulated gradually, one budget, one contribution decision, one deferred reckoning at a time. The consultant’s own review concluded that the County’s pension debt has been growing since 2004 and that the plan never recovered its funding trajectory following the Great Recession. For years, the system continued to pay benefits, employees continued to work and taxpayers continued to receive public services. On the surface, government continued to function. Beneath the surface, the unpaid bill grew.

This is not only a pension story. It is the same story we see in deteriorating roads, aging bridges, outdated public buildings, water systems approaching the end of their useful lives, and public institutions being asked to do more with less. It is also the story behind the growing political demand for broad property-tax cuts and caps. Across the country, states are restricting the revenues available to local governments and schools. Eleven states have enacted property-tax cuts or caps affecting local public revenues in 2026 alone, while earlier measures are already contributing to budget strains in several states.

We tend to discuss these issues separately. Pension funding belongs to the accountants and actuaries. Infrastructure belongs to engineers and public works departments. Property taxes belong to politicians and homeowners. But they are not separate issues. They are different expressions of the same political choice. We are consuming public value today while declining to pay its full cost.

We have mistaken low taxes for prosperity. We have mistaken deferred bills for savings. And we have allowed ourselves to believe that because an obligation does not appear on this year’s tax bill, it somehow does not exist. It does exist. It is simply waiting.

A pension contribution is part of the compensation earned by a public employee. When we pay the salary but fail to adequately fund the pension, we have not reduced the cost of government. We have paid only part of the bill and transferred the remainder to future taxpayers. When we use a road but fail to maintain it, we are consuming part of that road’s useful life without paying to replace it. When we occupy a public building while postponing its roof, heating system or structural repairs, we are drawing down an asset that previous generations paid to create.

This is not fiscal conservatism. It is borrowing without admitting that we have borrowed.

There was a time when collective action was understood not merely as a means of dividing costs, but as a way to create possibilities that none of us could create alone. Previous generations built roads, bridges, water systems, schools, parks, libraries, universities, transit systems and civic institutions. They did not build them because every project was perfect or because government was always efficient. They built them because they understood that shared investment could expand the capacity of an entire society.

Those investments helped businesses reach markets, workers reach jobs, children receive an education and families build economic security. They did not merely divide the existing economic pie differently. They helped make the pie larger. That is what growth looks like.

Today, we are increasingly unwilling not only to build the next generation of public assets, but even to maintain those we inherited. We are living on the accumulated investments of people who came before us while passing the cost of our own consumption to those who will come after us. Our predecessors left us both obligations and assets. We appear increasingly prepared to leave future generations the obligations after we have depleted the assets.

This is how communities, and nations decline. Usually not through one catastrophic decision, but through hundreds of smaller decisions that are politically convenient in the moment. We postpone a pension contribution. We delay the bridge repair. We reduce preventive maintenance. We cap a revenue source without identifying what will replace it. We call each decision temporary or necessary. Eventually, temporary becomes structural, and the room for responsible choices disappears.

The pension bill begins competing with current public safety. Yesterday’s deferred road maintenance competes with today’s parks and libraries. Aging water infrastructure competes with affordable rates. The cost of past services crowds out the community’s capacity to invest in its future. And the damage does not fall equally.

Wealthier households are not immune from civic decline, but they are better able to shield themselves from it. They can purchase private transportation when transit is inadequate. They can absorb higher fees and assessments. They can pay for private recreation, education, security and other substitutes for weakened public institutions. If a community deteriorates far enough, they have a greater ability to move elsewhere.

Middle- and lower-income families do not have the same options. They rely more directly on safe roads, functioning transit, responsive emergency services, strong schools, public parks, libraries, human services and affordable utilities. When the public realm shrinks, they experience the loss directly. What appears on paper as a tax cut can reappear as a vehicle repair, a higher water bill, a new municipal fee, a longer commute, a reduced public service or a lost economic opportunity.

The economic pie does not remain the same while everyone simply keeps a larger individual slice. As infrastructure deteriorates, institutions weaken and opportunity becomes less accessible, the pie itself becomes smaller. The community becomes less productive, less competitive and less capable of supporting broad prosperity.

None of this means that every tax increase is justified. It does not mean government should be protected from scrutiny or excused from the responsibility to operate efficiently. Public officials must prioritize, modernize, measure results and discontinue programs that no longer provide sufficient public value. Property taxes can create genuine hardship, particularly for retirees and working families whose incomes have not kept pace with housing values. Those households deserve relief. But there is a difference between targeted relief and collective denial.

We can design protections based on income and ability to pay. We can improve the fairness and accuracy of assessments. We can protect vulnerable homeowners and renters. We can demand better performance from government. What we cannot do is broadly dismantle the revenue base while insisting that pensions be paid, roads be repaired, public safety be protected, infrastructure be modernized and services remain unchanged.

Tax cuts can change who pays a public obligation. They can change when it is paid. They can conceal it in fees, debt, deferred maintenance or diminished services. They cannot make the obligation disappear.

Leadership begins by telling the truth about that arithmetic. It means rejecting the easy politics of promising every service while opposing every means of paying for it. It means treating pension funding as an obligation, not an optional year-end expenditure. It means identifying deferred infrastructure costs honestly and creating long-term plans to address them. It means providing targeted tax relief without destabilizing the institutions upon which the broader community depends.

Most importantly, it means recovering the belief that collective investment is not a burden imposed upon prosperity. It is one of the ways prosperity is created.

Allegheny County must address its pension crisis. There will be difficult choices, and no single revenue source or policy adjustment will resolve a problem that developed over decades. But the answer cannot simply be another round of delay, nor can it be to hollow out current services so completely that we honor yesterday’s commitments by abandoning tomorrow’s opportunities.

We should absolutely debate how our shared bills are divided. We should insist that those bills be fair, transparent and connected to real public value. But we must stop pretending that refusing to pay them is a governing philosophy.

We, as a region and a nation, have built great things through collective action before. We can repair what has been neglected, honor the promises that have been made and begin building again. That will require more than technical adjustments. It will require political leadership willing to say something increasingly unfashionable but fundamentally true:

A community that refuses to invest in itself cannot grow. Eventually, it cannot even remain what it was.

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Andrew Flynn

Andrew Flynn writes about public leadership, fiscal stewardship, and the systems communities rely on to function well. He is a commissioner in Mt. Lebanon, Pennsylvania, works in public finance, and serves as a volunteer firefighter and EMT. Browse the Writing section for more articles, or visit Meet Andrew to learn more.