State budget impasse hits 100th day

HARRISBURG - Today is a milestone that lawmakers and Gov. Rendell had hoped to avoid but didn't. Pennsylvania's budget impasse - the nation's longest - reaches Day 100.

The triple digits lend a moment's clarity to the otherwise impenetrable machinations of a state government unable to agree upon a budget. Clarity - and embarrassment.

"It's very difficult to follow the inside-baseball of conference committees and rules committees and concurrence," said Jeff Coleman, a former Republican legislator from Armstrong County. "It's very easy to follow '100 days.' "

A current member of the state House put it succinctly: "I think it is a failure of leadership on everybody's part," said Rep. Karen Beyer (R., Lehigh). "It's an embarrassment. I think the entire General Assembly owes the public one big apology."

Typically in politics, 100 days is the honeymoon for a new administration - "a point of measurement to see what's gotten done," said Chris Borick, a political science professor at Muhlenberg College. "But in this case, it's what hasn't gotten done."

Borick likened the governor and legislature to "a dysfunctional family," saying, "The public expects a high degree of conflict in politics, but there's also an expectation, even with partisanship, that things get done."

The stalemate takes Rep. Barbara McIlvaine Smith (D., Chester) back to the 1990s, when she taught youngsters at Penn Wood Elementary in West Chester.

"It reminds me of a class of fourth graders," she said yesterday, pausing momentarily. "Actually, they are more like kindergartners fighting over their toys. . . . I have lost my sense of trust here, and I don't trust what anybody is saying."

The United Way of Pennsylvania is marking the 100th budgetless day with a rally in Philadelphia and other events across the state, designed to draw attention to the fact that Pennsylvanians - particularly children and low-income families - are suffering as a result of the legislature's inaction.

Tony Ross, the group's executive director, compared the human impact of the budget crisis to the more visible consequences of a certain hurricane.

"This is a man-made Katrina," said Ross. "It has a negative impact on vulnerable people, and it is having a negative impact on their faith in government."

During the protracted stalemate, Beyer said, she has been like some of the stubborn points of contention in the budget itself - tugged in two different directions.

Many in the communities she represents in the Lehigh Valley work at day-care centers or volunteer at libraries. They pushed her to approve a budget, any budget, as long as it meant their organization's lifeline - their state subsidy checks - would finally arrive in the mail.

But just as many urged Beyer to oppose a budget that would increase their income taxes or sales taxes.

She said House Democratic leaders deserve blame for not starting the process sooner - but said her own leaders aren't without fault. House Republicans, she said, should not have boycotted talks with the other three caucuses - House Democrats, Senate Republicans, and Senate Democrats.

Republicans, who control the Senate, and Democrats, who hold the majority in the House, have been at odds over the spending plan since the fiscal year started July 1.

Along the way, each chamber has approved at least one budget bill reflecting each party's very different priorities on how much to spend and how much revenue to raise.

They appeared to come together on Sept. 18 when legislative leaders and Rendell announced a deal. But today is Day 20 since that deal began to unravel amid renewed partisan rancor.

Over the last week, lawmakers have tried to put a public face of good will on the dispute. It hasn't always worked. Rep. Dwight Evans (D., Phila.) said several times during a news briefing Monday that he wasn't going to "point fingers," then chastised Senate Republican leaders for skipping a meeting of the budget-crafting joint conference committee.

On Tuesday, the process hiccupped yet again. House Democratic leaders insisted they could not vote on an overall $27.8 billion budget because Senate Republicans had quietly tucked $12 million in discretionary funds known as Walking Around Money (WAM) inside.

Republicans insisted the governor, not lawmakers, would control that money and it was going to worthy causes, such as health clinics and hospitals.

Rendell yesterday fired off a letter to House Democratic leaders saying that their reasoning about the WAMs was a "circular argument" and that he took "great exception" to how they characterized the funding.

He and legislators were already scoring poorly in opinion polls. Evans warned colleagues on Saturday that they didn't want to see "100-day headlines."

Coleman, the former House member from Armstrong County who now heads a political consulting firm, called the number "an exclamation point" on a sorry chapter that began in 2005, when legislators sparked outcry by raising their own pay.

To be sure, there has been progress. Without a vote to spare, the House yesterday approved, 102-96, a bill establishing taxes and sent it to Rendell. It takes 102 votes for a bill to pass the 203-member House.

That bill would raise the cigarette tax and a tax on some businesses, but would not tax performing arts, natural-gas drilling, or small games of chance, controversial proposals in earlier drafts. The bill is the first key piece of the budget puzzle to get this far.

The second piece, a spending bill, passed the House at 10 last night, 107-93, and was headed for the Senate today. But more budget bills must follow.

For weeks, the Harrisburg Patriot-News has published an image of a calendar to track the duration of the impasse. Recently, the paper added a countdown to Feb. 2, when Rendell is to submit his next proposed budget, for fiscal 2011.

And Tony Romeo, Harrisburg reporter for KYW-AM (1060), has been ending his budget reports this way: ". . . And on it goes."