HARRISBURG Officials expect to cut costs by $10M

The environmental chief faced off with a GOP lawmaker on other matters.
HARRISBURG (AP) -- After 88 minutes of frenetic bidding by prospective contractors, delighted state officials said Thursday they expect to shave nearly $10 million from the price of office supplies that currently cost taxpayers $22.5 million a year.
"We were paying a lot more for our products than we could have been or should have been," General Services Secretary Donald T. Cunningham Jr. said after the online "reverse auction," in which an undisclosed number of suppliers raced against the clock to submit the lowest bid.
More than one of the low bids were for $13 million or less, officials said, although the signing of a new contract is still weeks away. Before making a decision, officials will grade the bidders on their commitments to provide reliable service and to advance businesses owned by minorities and women.
The auction was part of the "strategic sourcing" initiative through which Gov. Ed Rendell hopes to save $100 million a year on contracts for 20 or more commodity groups.
The administration says state purchasing has grown out of control, with individual departments cutting their own deals for $3 billion worth of goods and services -- often at full retail prices -- with tens of thousands of vendors that range from large corporations to small stores.
Meanwhile, a hostile House budget hearing on Thursday had a Republican lawmaker and Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell's environmental protection chief talking over each other to the point that the stenographer threw her hands in the air.
A later Senate budget hearing was more polite, but just as rigorous.
How it went
All told, Rendell's environmental protection secretary Kathleen McGinty spent four hours testifying in front of lawmakers about the governor's plan to impose new fees on polluting industries and trash dumping in order to finance environmental cleanups and other improvements to lure young professionals and businesses to Pennsylvania.
The plan would involve $800 million in bonding that is perhaps the centerpiece of Rendell's budget proposal for the 2004-05 fiscal year that begins July 1. The bonds would be issued over four years to -- among other things -- clean up abandoned mines, preserve farmland and improve recreation assets like state parks and public pools.
Though Democrats roundly praised McGinty and the plan, Republican lawmakers offered repeated examples of manufacturers or power plants that they said were barely surviving under the fees they already pay, and could be forced into layoffs or closures by another regulatory burden.
For her part, McGinty contended that the dollar value of business tax breaks in Rendell's budget proposal is six times as high as any new fees on businesses -- a figure that Republicans quarreled with, saying it seems closer to one-to-one.
Even so, some Republican lawmakers concluded that businesses would pass on the new fees, if they could.
"They don't have a printing press in their basement any more than we have one in ours," said Sen. Robert J. Thompson, the Chester County Republican who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee.
"So they go to the customers. ... That money comes from the residents of Pennsylvania, one way or another."
The new fees would pay for a variety of items, including a fund to clean up hazardous waste sites and spills and debt service on the $800 million in bonding, which would have to be approved by voters in a statewide ballot question.
In all, the administration estimates that the total raised by the new fees would be $153 million for a full year, an amount that pales in comparison to each of two separate cigarette tax increases approved by the Legislature in the past 20 months and tax increases on telephone usage approved in December.