State Rep. John M. Perzel was accused of finding the job.
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Living testimony from a Pa. ghost employee
HARRISBURG - For decades, Pennsylvania government has been haunted by ghosts - the illegal kind embodied by patronage hires who, though flesh and blood, don't do a stitch of work for their government salaries.
But rarely do they unmask themselves for all to see as Sue Cornell has done.
It was 2006, and Cornell, a freshman state representative, had just been booted from office by Montgomery County voters, and she needed a job.
She turned to the person who had recruited her to run - then-Speaker John M. Perzel.
Perzel found her work, assigning her to the office of his fellow Philadelphia Republican, then-Rep. George Kenney, for the same $72,187 salary she had as a legislator.
"I'll sit and answer phones. I'll pick up your dry cleaning," she recalled telling Kenney when she first approached her new boss.
How did Kenney, a legislative veteran, respond? He "just kind of laughed," said Cornell.
For a month and a half, Cornell collected a state paycheck without doing any work or setting foot in Kenney's office. Then Perzel got her another gig, one in which, she said, she did actual work: in-house lobbyist at the Philadelphia Parking Authority, a job created just for her.
These allegations and comments came from Cornell's testimony to a grand jury and were used by Attorney General Tom Corbett as an example of how Perzel misused the public purse.
Corbett charged Perzel and nine others this month with spending $10 million in taxpayer money on private consultants to build computer programs and give Republicans a leg up on Election Day.
But the 188-page grand-jury presentment goes far beyond that, and serves as what might be an insider's guide to how some in Harrisburg operated when they thought no one was watching. It includes accusations of do-nothing state workers and do-little state and campaign workers who got paid by taxpayers.
Or, as longtime activist Eric Epstein, founder of RockTheCapital.org put it, the grand-jury report "reads like a rogue manual on how to operate a banana republic."
Corbett leveled similar allegations in July 2008 when he charged a dozen House Democratic insiders with using state resources for campaign purposes.
A Harrisburg tradition
To be sure, what Perzel is accused of is not novel in Harrisburg. Other pols have been convicted of the offense.
State Sen. Henry "Buddy" Cianfrani (D., Phila.) did it in the 1970s. The Democrat who replaced him in the Senate, Vincent J. Fumo, is serving a 55-month federal prison sentence in part for putting friends on do-nothing state contracts.
And finding government work for displaced lawmakers is a time-honored tradition in Harrisburg. Most often, those defeated for new terms are put on short-term contracts - typically less than a year, at their legislative salary - to advise incoming lawmakers.
The standard defense: It was a temporary assignment, and former lawmakers worked hard for the money.
That's what makes the Cornell case stand out: She has admitted she was put in a no-work House job.
In an interview last week, Cornell declined to elaborate on her testimony, saying parking authority officials had instructed her not to discuss the matter. She now makes $67,894 as the authority's manager of government relations.
