pittsburgh leaders want to adopt neo's efficient-gov-now approach

In this Pittsburgh Business News post, eight recent graduates of Leadership Pittsburgh take on the topic of taxing gas revenues from the Marcellus Shale gas drilling.

Not only do they and those they polled overwhelmingly agree that the state should be compensated for the gas being harvested from it, they recommended that Pennsylvania adopt a model now used in Northeast Ohio called EfficientGovNow.

EfficientGovNow is a program that promotes government efficiency through regionalism, which in turn fuels economic development. EGN accelerates government efficiency by providing funds for collaboration projects that residents of Northeast Ohio select through voting.

"We recommend that there should be a tax or fee on Marcellus Shale Natural Gas Drilling and that a portion of the revenue should be used to incentivize local government collaboration that would create greater government efficiency. We suggest that a 'Pennsylvania Municipal Incentive Program,' modeled after northeast Ohio's EfficientGovNow (EGN), should be developed as an approach to drive a culture of collaboration and bipartisan problem solving to local government that could further leverage other investments from both the public and private sectors, long term."

Read the rest of the article here.