No transparency in "omnibus" bills

HARRISBURG - You can read House and Senate bills on a public Web site. You can track legislators' votes and lobbyists' expenses. If officials withhold public information, you can use the new right-to-know law to drag them into court.

But even in this era of government transparency, there is often no surefire way to learn who inserted words into a Pennsylvania law.

Lawmakers have taken strides toward transparency since 2005, when their middle-of-the-night vote to raise their pay touched off a firestorm of protest and calls for reforms.

Even so, there is little accounting for the closed-door negotiations in which legislative leaders and staffers often hash out key provisions, sometimes in a few words amid pages of text.

Such negotiations produced the sentence that gave the oft-delayed Foxwoods casino project a possible extension. It was inserted in a 230-page bill through an "omnibus amendment" - a sweeping package of provisions fused together, officially to save time voting on multiple amendments.

Under the state constitution, bills must be "considered" on three days to let lawmakers and the public scrutinize their content. But procedural maneuvers can shorten that time.

Pennsylvania is not the only state that doesn't provide the public with a full accounting of a bill's contents, said Brenda Erickson, a senior research analyst at the National Conference of State Legislatures.

She said Pennsylvania was actually more transparent in one way: Various iterations of a bill are available for public scrutiny online. Some states reveal only the final product.

New Jersey's Legislature does not formally disclose who made changes in a bill - except in the case of the state budget, where additions and deletions are noted.

Judy Nadler, who teaches ethics to public officials at Santa Clara University in California, said the issue was more "troubling" if the words in question benefited a private interest.

"The public has a right to know . . . where language came from," said Nadler, a former Santa Clara mayor. "If no one can account for the language, it feeds into skepticism that insiders got what they needed."