Sunday, July 26, 2009
HARRISBURG (AP) — When they talk about what they want out of the state’s 2009-10 budget, Gov. Ed Rendell and the state Senate’s Republican majority describe conflicting visions of the future.
Rendell, a Philadelphia Democrat, insists on more money for public schools to guarantee a vibrant economic future for Pennsylvania, while many Senate Republicans fret about the demands of a bloated government dragging down entrepreneurs and business owners like a giant, rusty anchor.
Both believe they are right.
The approaching end of Rendell’s term is adding grit to an already nasty fight in the trenches of a historic budget deficit over whether Rendell’s vision outlasts his term, or leaves with him.
“What the end of the administration does for both sides is it gives them more courage,” said David W. Patti, president and CEO of Pennsylvanians for Effective Government, a Harrisburg-based business advocacy group that presses an anti-tax philosophy in state government affairs.
“It’s easier for them to stand up to him, it’s easier for him to stand up to the Legislature because there’s less political consequence,” he said.
Patti and other observers note that numerous forces are feeding into this year’s stalemate — the longest since 1991, although it took until December in 2003 to finalize a public school subsidy.
Front and center is state government’s recession-driven revenue shortfall, the likes of which no state legislator can recall in 30-plus years in Harrisburg. Some observers also point to the relative inexperience of some key budget negotiators.
But no one discounts the desire of a hard-nosed governor to cement his legacy and the opposition’s eagerness to reassert itself.
“I think this is the perfect storm of inexperience, end of term, hard decisions,” said Barbara Hafer, a financial consultant who served eight years each as Pennsylvania’s independently elected state treasurer and auditor general.
Rendell says the only negotiating point on which he refuses to “crack” under Republican pressure is the hundreds of millions of dollars more he is seeking this year for public schools.
A former Philadelphia mayor, Rendell entered the governor’s office in 2003 having campaigned as a business-friendly Democrat who would push for efficiency in state government and fatten state government’s support for public schools. In 2006, he was re-elected in a landslide to a second four-year term.
Throughout his 61‚Ñ2-year tenure, the Senate’s solid Republican majority has provided the main counterweight to Rendell’s influence.
Nevertheless, he has persuaded senators to raise annual support for public school operations by $1.2 billion, or 30 percent, plus more than a half-billion more for high-tech high school classrooms, smaller class sizes, early childhood education and other education priorities.
School funding is its own kind of legacy: Every dollar put into it typically stays there — left untouched by legislators afraid of being blamed for a local property tax increase to offset their funding cut.
Governors, however, tend to lose the power of persuasion as the remainder of their terms dwindle. Their polling numbers typically drop, and public attention shifts to the platforms of the would-be governors vying to replace them. Defying a sitting governor, then, poses no political penalty in an election.
The January 2011 end of Rendell’s eight years in office is in sight, and he will not be in Harrisburg much longer to put his stamp on policy.
Republican senators are quick to list reasons why the state should cut spending rather than increase it. Among the reasons are a desire to conserve cash for the state’s rising pension and health-care costs — dilemmas that will outlast Rendell’s term.