I bet you could market units next to Heinz notwithstanding the traffic issues on game days due to the T station being right there.
Last I knew, this was the basic situation with the state transportation bill. The Senate by an overwhelming vote passed a bipartisan plan. It wasn't necessarily ideal in various respects, but it more or less preserved the traditional split of road versus transit funding, and got new revenues from a combination of uncapping gas taxes and raising various fees and fines.
The House Republican leadership then tried to overhaul the bill in a way that would please their tea-party-types. They cut back a lot on the new revenues, and took basically all of that funding out of transit (meaning the new split would be way more biased in favor of roads than has traditionally been the case, which is basically just a way of screwing the large urban counties). They also added some anti-union stuff, and so on.
The problem is that even with all those changes, the bill still raised gas taxes, and so the tea-party-types refused to vote for it anyway. The House Republican leadership then went to the House Democrats and asked for help passing the bill. The House Democrats said if you want our help, you have to restore the transit funding, remove some of the anti-union stuff, and so on--basically, go back to the Senate bill. The House Republican leadership didn't want to do that, and so nothing was passed (which then triggered a collapse of the liquor reform process, which is a whole other story).
All this should sound familiar, since it is basically the same dynamic that keeps playing out at the federal level. Decent compromise bills can pass the Senate, but nothing can pass through the House because the only bills that could make it through would require mainstream Republicans joining with Democrats, and the mainstream Republicans are too afraid of their tea-party-types to do that.
Anyway, up to now Corbett has provided very lukewarm support in favor of the Senate approach, but hasn't been willing to lean on the House Republicans to pass it. I don't know what he is currently proposing (I might try to look it up), but I'll bet dollars to donuts it won't do any good unless he has already checked that the House Democrats would be willing to go along, and that the House Republican leadership is finally willing to override the tea-party-types.
Edit: By the way, I have seen some reporting (like this article) that seems to suggest the only remaining hangup is whether to increase the threshold for the prevailing wage law. If so that is great news--that is a difficult issue but hopefully amenable to some basic horse-trading and compromise.
On the other hand if there are still unresolved revenue and transit funding issues, that is where there might be a real possibility of no bill at all.
Edit #2: This article doesn't really answer all of my questions, but at least helps provide confirmation of the basic issues at stake:
http://mediatrackers.org/pennsylvania/20...m-corbett-rock-hard-place-transportation
It sounds like Corbett might well be pushing for a House vote on the Senate bill. The question would then be whether mainstream Republicans were released by the House Republican Leadership to provide enough votes to pass it.
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