HARRISBURG -- Groups protesting the legislative pay raise installed a huge inflatable pig behind the state Capitol yesterday, as they announced plans for a high-decibel rally on Monday to urge legislators to repeal the raise.

Paul Chaplin, Patriot-News via AP A giant inflatable pig looms over the Capitol grounds yesterday in Harrisburg. Organizers plan to keep it there until a raucous rally scheduled for Monday to protest lawmakers' big pay raise. Click photo for larger image.

"We're going to rock the capital Sept. 26,'' the day the state House returns, vowed Eric Epstein, a social and political activist who dates his protests back to the 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant near here.

The Rock The Capital rally is to start at 1:30 p.m. on the front steps of the Capitol building.

He said 1,000 whistles and 1,000 cow bells will be given to participants. The 20-foot-high inflatable pig will stay in place, next to the Capitol fountain, until the rally.

Buses will bring in unhappy taxpayers from around the state, Epstein added, but he wouldn't predict how many will attend. After an hour or so of speeches, participants will go inside and try to talk to their legislators about repealing the raise. More information is available at www.rockthecapital.org.

Monday is the first day back for House members since they approved the raise in the early morning hours of July 7 and went home for the summer. Senators returned yesterday.

Another leader of the protest rally is Bob Durgin, a radio talk show host in Harrisburg who complains about the raise nearly every day on his show.

He said he's collected 124,600 petition signatures so far against the pay raise. He said he'll tape all the petition sheets together and unroll them on the steps of the Capitol, predicting they will reach a few hundred feet to Third Street in a roll about 15 feet wide.

Gov. Ed Rendell, House Speaker John Perzel and Senate President Pro Tem Robert Jubelirer -- all supporters of the raise -- will get copies.

"People are very dissatisfied about how they've been governed for years,'' Durgin said. "This pay raise was the catalyst to ignite this firestorm of anger. Every war is started with one incident and this is our incident.''

Conservative groups like the Commonwealth Foundation and Young Conservatives of Pennsylvania are helping to organize the protest, as are groups with more liberal leanings, like Common Cause and Democracy Rising Pennsylvania.

There are also religious groups, like the Lutheran Advocacy Ministry and Pennsylvania Council of Churches, and protesters of recent vintage like Pennsylvania Clean Sweep, which was born after the pay raise vote and seeks to oust all legislative incumbents in the 2006 elections.

Matthew Brouillette of the Commonwealth Foundation and Timothy Potts of Democracy Rising said yesterday they're increasingly alarmed at the secretive way the General Assembly does business. Many significant bills are voted on between midnight and 5 a.m. with little or no public discussion.

The two most egregious examples, they said, were the July 2004 vote to approve 14 slot machine casinos for Pennsylvania and this year's vote to raise legislators' pay from $69,647 to a base pay of $81,050, with some salaries going as high as $145,500.

"The pay raise is the latest manifestation of a system that hides public business from the public,'' Potts said.

"The gambling bill first brought together groups from around the political spectrum, but things have exploded with the pay raise,'' Brouillette said.

Lutheran Advocacy's Kathleen Daugherty said she's involved because the Legislature cut Medicaid funding for low-income people in the current state budget while voting itself a hefty pay raise.

"It started with the Medicaid cuts, but as we became more aware of the enormous raises and the unconstitutional process used to approve them, we decided it wasn't fair for them to vote raises for themselves while so many Pennsylvanians are struggling economically,'' she said.