Pa. leaders fail to enact big government reforms in ’07

Current and former
lawmakers were charged with crimes this year.

HARRISBURG (AP) — For a year that rang in heightened expectations of government reform in Pennsylvania, 2007 is retreating with a whimper.

What advocates hope will be the first overhaul of the state’s weak Right-to-Know Law in a half-century is bogged down in a dispute over details. Legislation to limit how much money donors may give to state and local political candidates has gone nowhere. So has a plan to replace the election of appellate judges with a system in which the governor appoints them from a prescreened list.

With little dissent, the House and Senate did revise their internal rules to make the legislative process more transparent. They imposed an 11 p.m. curfew for daily sessions, banned taxpayer-financed leasing of private vehicles for legislators and slowed the parliamentary process to give members more time to digest last-minute amendments to bills.

“I believe we’ve had more reform in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives in the last 12 months than we have since the War of 1812,” said House Majority Leader Bill DeWeese, D-Greene.

“We have a much different process than when I first got here,” agreed Senate Majority Leader Dominic F. Pileggi, R-Delaware. “It’s much more open, it’s much more transparent, it’s much more deliberate, it’s easier for people to follow, if they care to follow it.”

Reform was the battle cry when the Legislature was seated in January. Many of the 55 new members — one of the largest freshman contingents in state history — were elected on promises to clean up Harrisburg in the wake of the pay-raise scandal of 2005.

But the fact remains that months of hearings and discussion produced no sweeping changes in the state’s arcane political culture this year.

“They did no heavy lifting,” said Terry Madonna, a professor and pollster at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, adding that the Legislature’s approval rating continues to hover around 25 percent. “If they’ve done anything, the voters have missed it.”

Would-be reformers stress that this is only the halfway point in the Legislature’s two-year session and insist significant progress is possible — even likely — in the election year ahead. Others quibble over what qualifies as “reform,” and what is merely change for the sake of change.

In the absence of fundamental reform, corruption and other problems have dominated the year’s legislative news.

Perhaps the most disturbing new distraction was the nearly $4 million in bonuses paid to legislative employees in 2005 and 2006.

Whether the bonuses were illegal payments for election activity is the focus of a grand jury investigation by state Attorney General Tom Corbett. Already the probe has prompted DeWeese to oust seven employees of the House Democratic caucus, including his own chief of staff.

Some current and former lawmakers were charged with crimes this year.

A federal grand jury indicted Sen. Vincent Fumo, D-Philadelphia, on wide-ranging corruption charges. Sen. Robert Regola, R-Westmoreland, was charged with perjury and other offenses stemming from the death of a 14-year-old neighbor who shot himself with Regola’s pistol. Ex-Rep. Frank LaGrotta, D-Lawrence, was charged with two felony conflict-of-interest counts for allegedly having two relatives placed in state jobs for which they collected $25,000 for work that was never performed.

“The culture of corruption in Harrisburg is so deep, so thick, that the folks who are there cannot figure out how to extricate themselves from it without admitting complicity,” said Timothy Potts, a former legislative aide and co-founder of the government watchdog group Democracy Rising PA.

Of the major reform bills, the Right-to-Know Law overhaul appears to have the strongest chance of being sent to the governor in 2008.

Legislation approved by both houses would overturn the current underlying assumption of the law by declaring that all records are public beyond a list of exceptions. Current law presumes that records are not public unless they fall into one of two categories.

It also would expand the law to include financial records of the legislative and judicial branches, which are currently exempt, as well as Pennsylvania’s college loan agency and the community colleges.

Proponents hope that the differences between the House and Senate versions —for example, whether birth dates and business telephone numbers should be kept secret — can be worked out soon after lawmakers reconvene in January.