Meeting Transcript

Good afternoon and welcome to Pittsburgh City Council's cable cast public hearing for Tuesday, June 23rd, 2026, relative to Bill 0544. I'm Councilman Anthony Coghill, sponsored a bill. And if I will turn it over to our clerk, please read the title of the bills. Bill 544, ordinance amending and supplementing the Pittsburgh Code of Ordinances. Title 7, Business Licensing, Article 9, Amusement Businesses with a New Chapter. Chapter 774, Mechanical Amusement Devices Tax and Licenses. Thank you, Madam Clerk. Our first order of business will be a brief introduction of the legislation. Yeah, well, I'll comment on it briefly. So, you know, we set out pursuing this uh tax for additional revenue. Oh, I dating back probably over a year ago when council was debating whether to um you know increase our property taxes. So this was really an alternative for me to begin with, and um I I didn't really didn't support the property tax, and uh, you know, this was just another way of kind of thinking outside the box to create another revenue source for the city of Pittsburgh. As we all know now that um the state supreme court deemed that the skills games are gambling devices, and not knowing, um, and that state they gave the state legislature up to four months to really come up with uh regulation or tax or whatever they are plan to pursue. It's no secret, we feel that the um we we anticipated that the state would be taking this up, maybe not so so quickly, but the state that they would be taking this up, but there's no sure answer as to what they might do. Well, you know, we hear back and forth with state legislatures one flat fee, others want to tax at 52 percent, others want to tax at a lower rate at 35%. So um, not knowing of course what the state was going to do, we decided to continue down the path that we've started on over a year ago because we had uh a lot of work and research involved in it, and if case in the case that the state doesn't act on it, we will be situated to start collecting this tax and hopefully budgeting for our next years to come at a uh surplus of we hope two to three million dollars. Um a lot of those questions are unanswered right now, as to because we don't have a short count as to how many devices there are. Um we are talking through, we're meeting on a weekly basis with the administration and the necessary department heads, PLI, finance, as to uh, you know, the um people that will need in order to collect this tax. So we're hard at work at that. We're gonna continue to pursue it until told otherwise. Obviously, if the state supersedes our legislation, then um it may all be for naught. But uh at this point we're deep enough into it that we're gonna continue to pursue it, and um again, not knowing whether the state's gonna how they're gonna act on it, uh, we thought it prudent to continue to um pursue. So with that, that's a brief uh synopsis of where we're at in the whole situation. And um that will be that. And any comments from our guests. So uh our next order of business will be testimony from our registered speakers. Please give your name and neighborhood of public record. Each registered speaker will have three minutes to address council. I do not see any registered speakers and nobody has signed up and nobody is online. Is that right, um, Madam Clerk? Okay. So uh so there are no registered speakers for the record. And uh having exhausted that and not having that, we will um. Uh seeing no further speakers, for seeing no speakers, we will move on to comments from members of council, which there are only one member, and that's me. And you have just heard my comments. So, having exhausted the business of this public hearing, this meeting is adjourned.