Student sit-in protests tuition tax

A group of about 10 people had gathered outside the mayor’s office by 11:01 this… A group of about 10 people had gathered outside the mayor’s office by 11:01 this morning.

The objective: Protest Mayor Luke Ravenstahl’s proposed Fair Share Tax with a day-long student sit-in.

The problem: Only three of those gathered were local students. The rest were reporters, cameramen and photographers – and by 11:34, most of the media had cleared out.

“I think it’s what we expected, honestly,” Carnegie Mellon student Aaron Gross, chair of CMU’s Undergraduate Student Senate, said. “It’s really hard to turn out students at 9 a.m. during finals week.”

Pitt and CMU are in their finals weeks, while Duquesne and Chatham universities have already ended for the fall semester.

Gross was one of the organizers of the student sit-in, which had 60 attendees on its Facebook group, “Sit in at Mayor Luke Ravenstahl’s Office,” as of this morning. The sit-in, which lasted from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. outside the mayor’s fifth-floor office of the City-County Building Downtown, was a public protest against the proposed Fair Share Tax, which would require students to pay an annual equivalent of 1 percent of their university tuition to cover the city’s dwindling pension fund.

“We really want the mayor to know that he has a lot of power in this arena, and we want him to exercise it judicially,” Gross said.

Throughout the day, the protest saw about 16 students in all, estimated Daniel Jimenez, sit-in organizer and president of Pitt’s Graduate and Professional Student Assembly.

The student sit-in comes two days before the potential Pittsburgh City Council vote on the tax and Ravenstahl’s deadline for nonprofits to take his offer to collectively pay $5 million per year.

Jimenez, who publicized the event through Twitter updates, e-mails and the Facebook event, said the sit-in was a peaceful means of projecting student opinion.

“I think students have been very good about getting our message across while still being very respectful,” he said, citing GSPA’s e-mail campaign to City Council members and Chatham University’s “virtual protest” as continuing efforts to project student opinion.

He hoped the sit-in would attract media attention to give a “human face to this tax” and persuade City Council members from being strong-armed into voting for the proposal.

Darcy Mandell, a Pitt graduate student, attended the sit-in as a concerned voter.

She said she was not surprised by the relatively low student turnout, adding that it might be intimidating for students to confront the mayor face-to-face.

But for Mandell, it’s not a matter of taxation, but of damaging Pittsburgh’s allure to future college students.

“I’m actually probably one of the students who can afford to pay without leaving school,” she said. “More of the problem would be there might not be as big as incentive to come [to school in Pittsburgh] in the first place.”

Pitt junior P.J. Dillon said the council’s voting timetable might have been strategic in limiting student involvement.

“It’s a chess game,” he said. “They knew that if they passed [the Fair Share Tax] right around now, they wouldn’t have much student involvement.”

Dillon said that he would not have minded paying the tax had the proposal considered international or out-of-area students who do not vote in Pittsburgh elections.

“‘No taxation without representation’ has been the cry of every liberation movement ever,” he said. “That’s part of the ploy to introduce this tax.”

Throughout the day, Jimenez and other students met with individual City Council members — including Tonya Payne, Patrick Dowd, Ricky Burgess and Jim Motznik — to discuss the negative ramifications of the Fair Share Tax.

After several futile attempts to speak directly with Ravenstahl, Jimenez met with the mayor’s chief of staff, Yarone Zober, though he said “nothing came out of that.”

Mayor Luke Ravenstahl’s office did not respond to phone calls regarding the sit-in.

Jimenez ultimately called the sit-in a successful one, noting that, despite the turnout, he and fellow organizers spoke with more officials than expected.

Gross said that while he’s in opposition to the tax, it did allow for cross-university collaboration.

He and other leaders of Pittsburgh university student governments have been meeting to discuss the tax implications since it was proposed on Nov. 9.

“It’s really brought student leaders together,” he said. “In that respect, we’re really thankful to the mayor — in a very backhanded kind of way.”

Half a dozen students attended a 2 p.m. public meeting, during which Ravenstahl, Chancellor Mark Nordenberg and officials from Chatham, Robert Morris, the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and the Community College of Allegheny County discussed the Fair Share Tax, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

During the two-and-a-half-hour meeting, neither side budged, with university representatives reiterating their opposition to the proposed tax hike as well as to Ravenstahl’s proposal to stop considering the tax if the city’s nonprofit organizations pay a collective $5 million per year.

As it stands, the Council still remains divided on the tax, with five of its nine members in support of the proposal.