The following is from Tim Potts, founder and head of Democracy Rising PA, whose goal is to reform government in Pennsylvania, unarguably the most corrupt state in the nation.
WAMs - The Highest Cost of Corruption
Last week's back-and-forth between Gov. Ed Rendell and legislative leaders somehow walked around Walking Around Money, or WAMs. This was especially curious because Associated Press Capitol reporter Marc Levy's three-part series put the matter front and center. Yet high-profile interviews never touched on spending that, according to Capitol insiders, amounts to $750 million in the current year's budget.
A few reporters questioned the $201 million surplus in legislative accounts, but none pressed the case to find out why lawmakers think it's fair to keep a 67% percent surplus while telling school districts that they should use their capped 8% reserve to balance the budget. Or why the executive and judicial branches must shut down or endure payless paydays while lawmakers and their staff roll merrily along.
Add the surplus and WAMs, and you get close to $1 billion in dubious spending and possible savings that could help to resolve this year's budget dilemma.
What to expect. Don't expect either the governor or lawmakers to give up their pork while their constituents eat beans. Until there's a deal, leaders will meet privately with each other, the governor and the gambling interests, who have the access ensured by $4.4 million in campaign contributions.
This reduces many rank-and-file lawmakers to expensive eye candy. When not being wined and dined by lobbyists and cajoled by leaders, lawmakers clog golf courses, restaurants and phone banks where they busily dial for dollars. Legislators also debate a few important issues to kill time in between relatively inconsequential lawmaking and feel-good resolutions. Looking to make sandals PA's official summer footwear? Your time has come.
Meanwhile, with budget and tax votes looming, lawmakers hold out for election insurance, i.e. WAMs. Because leaders need 102 House votes and 26 Senate votes to pass a budget, WAMs are a carrot leaders use to extort votes, just as lawmakers use their votes to extort WAMs.
What's corrupt about WAMs? Secret programs invite abuse and illegality. Just ask the jurors who convicted former Sen. Vince Fumo, D-Phila.
Some say that WAMs let lawmakers get their fair share of state taxes. However, Levy's report illustrates that WAMs are a way for legislative leaders to give money to themselves at the expense of everyone else. For example, former Majority Leader Bill DeWeese, D-Greene, directed $82 per constituent to Greene County at the expense of citizens in Bedford County, who received only 20 cents per constituent during the last half of 2008.
Some point to worthwhile projects that WAMs support, such as libraries, senior centers and fire companies. But while funding for WAMs grows, lawmakers do not fund adequately the established programs that serve citizens statewide. Instead of allowing professionals with a statewide perspective to allocate funds on the basis of need, lawmakers siphon off money for WAMs that take from the weak and give to the well-connected.
WAMs are unconstitutional. This is why lawmakers and governors are so determined to keep secret how WAMs are allocated, where they are in the budget, how organizations apply for them and which organizations apply for WAMs but don't get them.
WAMs violate the separation of powers. The money for WAMs is appropriated to executive agencies. Once that happens, it is unconstitutional for members of the legislative branch to decide how the money is spent. This distinguishes WAMs from federal "earmarks," where the law appropriating the money states the project being funded and the lawmaker who got the earmark. Once the law is enacted, federal lawmakers have no further decision-making authority, a practice that maintains the separation of powers.
Second, some WAMs circumvent constitutional requirements for giving tax dollars to private parties. For example the Constitution says that appropriations to private schools must be in a separate bill from general appropriations. These are called "non-preferred" appropriations. There are dozens of them each year, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, to private colleges and universities. Yet DeWeese got a $1 million WAM for private Waynesburg University to renovate a science hall without a bill and a vote, as the Constitution requires.
The reason for the constitutional requirement is simple when you realize that the state's own public universities have science halls, dormitories and other facilities in serious need of repair.
Question:
How high will the cost of corruption have to go before we decide to stop it?
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Tax hikes? How about paring the Legislature? Guest Column
By Brian O'Neill, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Gov. Ed Rendell's campaign to raise the state income tax should be no more popular or successful than Walter Mondale's pledge to raise federal taxes in 1984.
Mr. Mondale got creamed in his bid to unseat President Ronald Reagan (who continued to blithely run up the national credit card). Mr. Rendell is going to lose this argument, too, as he should.
Because there is no way America's Largest Full-Time State Legislature can justify even a small increase in taxes until it pares its own budget.
Senate Republicans will prevail in blocking this tax increase (which would run about $5 a week for a person earning $50,000 a year). But before they impose the only alternative, massive cuts in education and elsewhere, legislators need to share more of the pain they're about to dish out.
The Republican-dominated state Senate passed a bill last month that would cut legislative appropriations by more than 10 percent from current levels (from $332.2 million to $293 million), but that isn't nearly enough. With 253 legislators, that still works out to $1.16 million per legislator. That's an unfathomable expense just to keep the chambers running.
Senate Republican spokesman Erik Arneson pointed to the proposed 10 percent cut and also to a 9 percent cut in number of staffers in the Republican caucus since January 2006 -- about 40 positions. But when 40 jobs represent just 9 percent of the total, that only reminds us that our Legislature has the most staffers of any statehouse in the republic. There were roughly 3,000 helpers at last count.
Legislative expenses should be cut by at least 20 percent, as some area lawmakers from both parties have suggested.
"I understand your point," Mr. Arneson wrote at the end of our e-mail exchange. "Given the way revenues have continued to plummet, it is absolutely fair to expect us to look at cutting the legislature further if we reach agreement to adopt a no-tax-increase budget that makes the other cuts included in Senate Bill 850 [which proposes the 10 percent cut]."
That would be wisdom were it not for the "if." There should be no ''if." Slashing the legislative budget should be dependent on nothing else. It's imperative.
Every few years, the Pennsylvania citizenry wakes up to what is happening in Harrisburg. The unconstitutional mid-term pay grab in the summer of 2005 was one such moment, and this idea of raising taxes during a recession is another.
It's true that the Legislature cannot balance the budget simply by lopping itself. The savings would be in the tens of millions of dollars, and the budget deficit is estimated at $3.2 billion. That doesn't matter. This is about sharing the pain.
There would be any number of places to begin. Lawmaking is not a physically demanding job like, say, firefighting or mining. Its demands are mental. Trying to justify yet another day in Harrisburg to snarf up the $158 per diem can tax the brain. So here's one quick savings idea: Let's call one $158 meeting to discuss eliminating the right of retired lawmakers to begin receiving a full pension at age 50.
That's at least 10 years too young, and we'd have more healthy turnover in the statehouse if there were no legislative pension. Put the lawmakers on a 401(k). One day soon they will have to deal with ticking pension time bomb for state workers, and they'll need to make their own sacrifices first.
Then there is, of course, the size of the Legislature itself. We have 253 lawmakers. Comparable states, Ohio and Illinois, get by with 132 and 177.
The Pennsylvania Constitution allows no voters' initiative to get a referendum on the ballot, and reducing the Legislature's size requires a constitutional change. But all downsizing proposals have sputtered in Harrisburg largely because the lawmakers have no reason to believe they'll be voted out if they don't reform now.
This "temporary" tax increase, which Gov. Rendell says would last three years, provides the opening for the tedious process of changing the constitution. Call your state senator and representative and offer this simple advice: "Tax me? Cut you."
That probably won't work, but it would be good for one's soul.
Gov. Ed Rendell's campaign to raise the state income tax should be no more popular or successful than Walter Mondale's pledge to raise federal taxes in 1984.
Mr. Mondale got creamed in his bid to unseat President Ronald Reagan (who continued to blithely run up the national credit card). Mr. Rendell is going to lose this argument, too, as he should.
Because there is no way America's Largest Full-Time State Legislature can justify even a small increase in taxes until it pares its own budget.
Senate Republicans will prevail in blocking this tax increase (which would run about $5 a week for a person earning $50,000 a year). But before they impose the only alternative, massive cuts in education and elsewhere, legislators need to share more of the pain they're about to dish out.
The Republican-dominated state Senate passed a bill last month that would cut legislative appropriations by more than 10 percent from current levels (from $332.2 million to $293 million), but that isn't nearly enough. With 253 legislators, that still works out to $1.16 million per legislator. That's an unfathomable expense just to keep the chambers running.
Senate Republican spokesman Erik Arneson pointed to the proposed 10 percent cut and also to a 9 percent cut in number of staffers in the Republican caucus since January 2006 -- about 40 positions. But when 40 jobs represent just 9 percent of the total, that only reminds us that our Legislature has the most staffers of any statehouse in the republic. There were roughly 3,000 helpers at last count.
Legislative expenses should be cut by at least 20 percent, as some area lawmakers from both parties have suggested.
"I understand your point," Mr. Arneson wrote at the end of our e-mail exchange. "Given the way revenues have continued to plummet, it is absolutely fair to expect us to look at cutting the legislature further if we reach agreement to adopt a no-tax-increase budget that makes the other cuts included in Senate Bill 850 [which proposes the 10 percent cut]."
That would be wisdom were it not for the "if." There should be no ''if." Slashing the legislative budget should be dependent on nothing else. It's imperative.
Every few years, the Pennsylvania citizenry wakes up to what is happening in Harrisburg. The unconstitutional mid-term pay grab in the summer of 2005 was one such moment, and this idea of raising taxes during a recession is another.
It's true that the Legislature cannot balance the budget simply by lopping itself. The savings would be in the tens of millions of dollars, and the budget deficit is estimated at $3.2 billion. That doesn't matter. This is about sharing the pain.
There would be any number of places to begin. Lawmaking is not a physically demanding job like, say, firefighting or mining. Its demands are mental. Trying to justify yet another day in Harrisburg to snarf up the $158 per diem can tax the brain. So here's one quick savings idea: Let's call one $158 meeting to discuss eliminating the right of retired lawmakers to begin receiving a full pension at age 50.
That's at least 10 years too young, and we'd have more healthy turnover in the statehouse if there were no legislative pension. Put the lawmakers on a 401(k). One day soon they will have to deal with ticking pension time bomb for state workers, and they'll need to make their own sacrifices first.
Then there is, of course, the size of the Legislature itself. We have 253 lawmakers. Comparable states, Ohio and Illinois, get by with 132 and 177.
The Pennsylvania Constitution allows no voters' initiative to get a referendum on the ballot, and reducing the Legislature's size requires a constitutional change. But all downsizing proposals have sputtered in Harrisburg largely because the lawmakers have no reason to believe they'll be voted out if they don't reform now.
This "temporary" tax increase, which Gov. Rendell says would last three years, provides the opening for the tedious process of changing the constitution. Call your state senator and representative and offer this simple advice: "Tax me? Cut you."
That probably won't work, but it would be good for one's soul.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Erie Times-News drops the ball again
The Erie Times-News carried an AP story today (State grants grow as criticism persists, Practice said to be unfair election tool) which exposes the longstanding practice of state legislative leaders to corral tens of millions of taxpayer dollars illegally every year and dole them out as special community grants to favored legislators outside the constitutionally prescribed budgetary process, using it primarily as a reelection campaign tool for select incumbents.
It's standard newspaper practice in such matters to localize a story like this by contacting local legislators and grilling them on what role,if any, they have played or are playing in such unsavory practices, and expose their malfeasance to local citizens, if any.
This story gives the Times-Snooze a perfect opportunity to play a role in ongoing and so far unsuccessful efforts by some legislators and citizen activists and groups to reform the legislature and curb rampant abuses like this one by bringing to the attention of local voters how legislators they have elected have and are performing on this issue so they can decide whether to retain them at the next elections.
For example, local State Senator Jane Earll, a Republican, as chair of the Senate Community, Recreational Development and member of the Gaming committees is one of those hallowed "legislative leaders." Does she condone and persist in this practice, or is she one of the reformers? How about the other half dozen area state legislators? Have they participated in this annual boondoggle?
Holding local legislators accountable for their actions in office is standard newspaper practice except at the Times-Snooze, which consistently prattles on in its editorials on how important freedom of the press protections under the First Amendment enable the press to function, but ignores the concommitant responsibility to exercise that freedom to expose legislative wrongdoers on behalf of the broad public interest.
It's standard newspaper practice in such matters to localize a story like this by contacting local legislators and grilling them on what role,if any, they have played or are playing in such unsavory practices, and expose their malfeasance to local citizens, if any.
This story gives the Times-Snooze a perfect opportunity to play a role in ongoing and so far unsuccessful efforts by some legislators and citizen activists and groups to reform the legislature and curb rampant abuses like this one by bringing to the attention of local voters how legislators they have elected have and are performing on this issue so they can decide whether to retain them at the next elections.
For example, local State Senator Jane Earll, a Republican, as chair of the Senate Community, Recreational Development and member of the Gaming committees is one of those hallowed "legislative leaders." Does she condone and persist in this practice, or is she one of the reformers? How about the other half dozen area state legislators? Have they participated in this annual boondoggle?
Holding local legislators accountable for their actions in office is standard newspaper practice except at the Times-Snooze, which consistently prattles on in its editorials on how important freedom of the press protections under the First Amendment enable the press to function, but ignores the concommitant responsibility to exercise that freedom to expose legislative wrongdoers on behalf of the broad public interest.
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