Harrisburg feeling the winds of change

One in an occasional series.

HARRISBURG - For a decade, a driver shuttled Rep. Bill DeWeese back and forth from his legislative district in the southwestern corner of Pennsylvania to his parking spot by the Capitol. The taxpayers paid for the chauffeur.

Last month, DeWeese got behind the wheel of his Chevy Silverado pickup and began driving himself.

Some say the Greene County Democrat was reacting to the locomotive of change barreling through the General Assembly. DeWeese, who recently became House majority leader, said he was just a little late jumping on board.

"I was not on the engine of this train," he said, "but I did grab hold of that caboose, John Wayne-fashion, and I am trying to make my way to the front, boxcar by boxcar."

Defying skeptics, Harrisburg is responding to the public outcry that began with the ill-fated 2005 legislative pay raise and hasn't let up.

The House and Senate are nearly falling over each other to make their spending practices more accountable and transparent. They have begun to dismantle a decades-old system in which a clutch of leaders controlled the lawmaking process, dispensed millions in discretionary cash, and blocked citizen access to information.

"It's a new day," said Rep. Josh Shapiro (D., Montgomery), cochairman of the House's newly formed Commission on Legislative Reform and a driving force for the changes.

They include the following:

The House, taking its cue from the Senate, is poised to surrender a prized perk - allowing its members to spend up to $650 a month on private leases for the vehicle of their choice. Instead, they will pick from a cheaper fleet of state pool cars.

Senate Republican leaders have nixed controversial bonuses for staffers, which last year ranged from $442 to $22,500 - a practice that went undisclosed for years. Both parties' House leaders have suspended this practice as well.

The public's business will no longer be conducted when the public is asleep. Legislative session hours will end at 11 p.m. Occasional wee-hours sessions were an accepted practice until the 2 a.m. vote on July 7, 2005, that raised legislators' pay - and ignited voter outrage.

For the first time, you can go online to see how senators voted in committee and floor votes. The House is expected to follow suit, and is also considering giving constituents access to legislators' expenses via e-mail request.

Previously, if you weren't in the Capitol to see the votes cast, you had to make a special request to state officials for the information. Reporting the votes online could put Pennsylvania ahead of New Jersey, whose legislature is now considering such a move.

Taken together, the changes have one critic of the legislature saying this may be "the first step down a long road of restoring faith in government."

"We finally feel the light of reform warming the backs of voters," said Eric Epstein, a longtime antinuclear activist who formed an advocacy group, RockTheCapital.org, after the pay raise. "Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think we would come even this far."

The Senate made some changes in early January, establishing a six-hour waiting period so members could fully review amended bills before voting on them, and posting votes and bill amendments online. Sen. Dominic Pileggi (R., Delaware) called this "a constructive start" that would result in "legislation that is better crafted, better understood, and better received by Pennsylvanians."

Pileggi was elevated to Senate majority leader after voters booted the chamber's top two Republicans from office last year.

In the House, many of the new measures are the product of the reform commission established by Rep. Dennis M. O'Brien (R., Phila.) after he became speaker in January.

The panel hunkered down for 29 hours over the last month, considering dozens of proposals to bring transparency to the legislative process. "Everything on the agenda embraced reform in one way or another," O'Brien said last week. "It exceeded my expectations."

The full House is to consider the commission's 32 proposed rule changes on March 12. All are expected to pass.

Shapiro said the proposals give more say to rank-and-file members whose bills were routinely blocked in the past and who were often shut out of floor debates.

For example, he said, a bill he sponsored last year to outlaw drivers' use of handheld cell phones passed the Senate - only to return to the House and be gutted by the then-GOP-controlled Rules Committee.

"It was frustrating to see how the process moved so quickly and the language changed at the last minute," Shapiro said.

He said under the new rules, his cell-phone bill would have to be considered exactly as it came over from the Senate.

The public appears to like the trend. In a January poll released last week by IssuesPA and the Pew Charitable Trusts, two-thirds of 1,096 Pennsylvanians polled said they had some or a lot of confidence in the legislature as a whole - up from 48 percent in November 2005.

Larry Hugick, who ran the poll, called this shift "dramatic" and a product of an influx of freshman legislators, 55 in all, many of whom ran on reform platforms. "It's a different cast of characters," Hugick said.

In the past, the legislature - particularly the House - made such facts as staff salaries hard to get. Rather than release salaries of all 1,924 employees, the House gave up data on just 15 staffers at a time. A reporter or anyone else asking for this had to wait - often a week or more - to request another 15. By the time a full list could be compiled, its numbers would be way out of date.

A few years ago, then-House Parliamentarian Clancy Myer told an Inquirer reporter he would release full salary information only if the newspaper agreed to release the salaries of all of its journalists.

But last month, at O'Brien's prompting, the House began releasing the full list. (The Senate has done so for years.)

Not everyone is riding the openness train. The Harrisburg Patriot-News and others had to sue to get the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency, which issues student loans, to release details of travel costs for its board, which is mostly legislators. When records were finally disclosed last week, much was blacked out - to protect trade secrets and privacy, the agency said. (Its chief executive, Dick Willey, vowed to curb what he called "outrageous" staff entertainment expenses revealed by the records.)

And lots of tougher, more ingrained aspects of Harrisburg culture will require legislation, not just tweaking of internal rules, said Barry Kauffman, head of Common Cause Pennsylvania, a nonpartisan group. "There's a lot left to be done," he said.

Veteran legislators can still entrench themselves as powerful committee chairmen, some for decades. And campaign money? Even as Congress and many states have curbed the biggest donations, Pennsylvania remains one of only 13 states that don't limit individual giving to state candidates.

Shapiro said the House reform panel planned to take up campaign finance and other issues soon.

Still, some question whether the new rules will truly change Harrisburg.

"Everybody's talking reform," said Rep. Greg Vitali (D., Delaware), a reform commission member who for years has launched House floor protests over last-minute bills and amendments slipped in without notice to members. "But even the proposed rules can be abused if a majority agrees."

A significant force for change in the House is the presence of 50 new members, many of whom ran on reform platforms. "We have to put the trust back up here," said Rep. Tim Mahoney (D., Fayette), the only freshman on the reform panel and the sponsor of a bill to create a central repository for all state and local government records.

Meanwhile, legislative leaders are pledging to advance the changes advocated in large part by the newcomers. DeWeese made an impromptu visit to the reform commission's meeting last week - to announce he would strip the Rules Committee of its power to arbitrarily amend or gut bills that come over from the Senate.

Part of this is veterans reading the handwriting on the wall. In a state where incumbents usually coast to reelection, 24 were ousted last year - the most in decades. DeWeese, a 15-term incumbent, squeaked past a novice challenger by 1,041 votes.

Which helps explain why he's giving up his driver, who cost taxpayers $32,000 last year.

"If we do not abandon the status quo and adapt to a more wholesome and idealistic approach to governing," DeWeese said, "then we will be replaced by those that will."