If pension funds lose, taxpayers would cover

HARRISBURG - A bill to force Pennsylvania's two massive public-sector pension plans to sell stock in companies deemed to be complicit in bloodshed in the Darfur region of Sudan was changed yesterday so that state taxpayers - not the pension funds - would cover resulting investment losses.

"It's a chance for you all to put your money where your mouth is," said Rep. Steven Nickol (R., York), sponsor of the amendment. "If we're going to conduct foreign policy with pension money that really doesn't belong to us, we should be willing to reimburse [the] pension funds for any losses."

Nineteen Democrats crossed party lines to vote for the Nickol amendment, and only four Republicans voted against it. It passed, 113-85.

The Democratic majority defeated several other Republican-sponsored amendments to the proposed Sudan Divestment Act, which covers investments by the State Employees' Retirement System and Public School Employees' Retirement System. A final House vote on the bill could occur this week.

"I do not want blood on my hands. I do not want my money going to a company which helps a government perform genocide," said the bill's sponsor, Rep. Babette Josephs (D., Phila.).

The bill includes a "stop loss" provision that would limit the funds' losses to $500 million. Together, their value is approaching $100 billion.

Protecting landowners. Pennsylvania property owners who allow hunting on their land are now shielded from lawsuits over accidents involving victims off the property, under a bill that Gov. Rendell has signed into law.

Landowners who allow the free use of their property for recreational activities - such as hunting, fishing, swimming and hiking - have been protected from liability for accidents for more than four decades.

The bill Rendell signed Saturday, prompted by a bizarre hunting accident in Lehigh County in 2004, extends that protection for hunting even when the victim is in a distant location. The revision to the Recreational Use of Land and Water Act, which was approved unanimously by both houses of the legislature, was developed after a Lehigh County orchardist was successfully sued for the shooting of a pregnant woman by a man who was hunting deer on the farmland.