HARRISBURG -- Making the state House of Representatives more "open and transparent" has been the mantra of Democratic leaders ever since they took control of the chamber in January.

But how did they do?

Terrific, if you listen to House leaders like Bill DeWeese and Keith McCall.

Terrible, if you talk to Rep. John Maher, R-Upper St. Clair, or Tim Potts, leader of a citizens group called Democracy Rising PA.

"The first six months of this two-year session were punctuated by serious and substantial changes in the way we do business," said Mr. DeWeese, D-Waynesburg, a 30-year legislator who admits he has been slow to take to the new procedures.

Some changes, such as the mandatory 24-hour wait between amending a bill and taking a final vote, have slowed down the process, which is both good and bad, said Mr. McCall, D-Carbon.

The delay has given legislators a better chance to understand what they're voting on, he said, "but it's made it more cumbersome to manage the [voting] calendar." The enforced waiting periods added a couple of days to the 17-day delay in adopting a new state budget, which wasn't completed until almost midnight on Monday.

But Mr. Potts, who is a former aide to Mr. DeWeese, doesn't see things as much better than they were under previous leaders, who would keep rank-and-file members in the dark and use "gut and replace" tactics, sending bills to the Rules Committee for major, last-minute changes and quick votes.

"There has been no improvement in the most significant aspects of the legislative work, such as the capital budget, the transportation budget or the new gaming and economic development budget," claimed Mr. Potts, who was a leader in fighting the 2005 legislative pay raise.

He noted that a small group of legislative leaders, just as in the past, decided the final details of the new $27.2 billion budget. A conference committee completed that work last Sunday night and then rank-and-file lawmakers had to vote the very next day.

Mr. Maher said the GOP wasn't given advance notice on some important bills, such as the $750 million transportation aid bill, the $2 billion slots-funded development program or a bill to sell the State Office Building in Pittsburgh.

The last measure "came out of thin air, just before we adjourned for the summer and they cut off debate," Mr. Maher charged.

Signs of change

The new rules were adopted in March, after several hearings were held on them by a procedural "reform" panel led by Reps. David Steil, R-Bucks, and Josh Shapiro, D-Montgomery. Mr. DeWeese and Mr. McCall said they do indeed make the legislative process easier for people to understand. Some of these included:

Adjournment by 11 p.m. on session nights, to prevent legislation being discussed and enacted in the middle of the night.

The 24-hour delay between amendment of a bill and a final vote. The Senate adopted a shorter wait, six hours.

Restrictions on the House Rules Committee's ability to "gut" a bill at the last minute and replace it with drastically different wording.

"I thought the 24-hour waiting rule was a big plus," said freshman Rep. Eugene DePasquale, D-York, grandson of former Pittsburgh city councilman Eugene "Jeep" DePasquale. "For a freshman who doesn't have a ton of staffers and has to read the bills himself, it gave me a full day to review the final draft [of a bill].''

The idea for quitting by 11 p.m. was to avoid a repeat of what happened in July 2004, when the law creating 14 slots casinos was enacted at 5 a.m., or the July 2005 legislative pay raise, which happened at 2 a.m.

The House and Senate each went past 11 p.m. only once or twice this spring and summer and not for very long.

G. Terry Madonna, a Franklin & Marshall College political science professor, said legislative leaders deserve some credit for giving lawmakers, the news media and the public more details of bills before voting.

"As someone who has watched this stuff for years, I felt I had a much better understanding of the substance of legislation than in the past,'' he said.

Bob Butera, a former Republican legislator who was special counsel to the House panel that developed the new rules, said, "Reform is a gradual thing." He conceded that the new openness was "not perfect."

He thought the new rules promoted the lengthy open discussions on the $750 million transportation aid bill, which did win final approval, and a bill to ban smoking in the workplace, which wasn't finally enacted despite four days of House debate.

As far as the "gut and replace" tactics of the past, the verdict was mixed. There wasn't anything as egregious as what happened in late June 2004, when a two-page bill on penalties for committing financial fraud was turned, with no notice, into the 140-page Act 71, the bill that authorized 14 slots casinos.

But Mr. Maher and Mr. Potts said the transportation bill was written behind closed doors in the House and then drastically changed, also in private, in the Senate. The Senate version, which critics said gave great power to the Turnpike Commission to sell $13 billion in bonds, was voted on near midnight on July 15, just before senators went home for the summer, and sent back to the House for its last-minute vote on July 16.

Mr. Maher said it was difficult to get details of the slots-funded development bill, which provides $225 million for a new Pittsburgh hockey arena. The House waived its 24-hour rule in that case, amending the bill by adding 200 projects around the state. Then, the bill was completely changed in the Senate and sent back to the House with just Pittsburgh and Philadelphia projects.

Mr. Maher blasted the final version of the bill for using slots revenue to provide $880 million for expanding the Philadelphia convention center while property tax payers, who were supposed to benefit from slots revenue, received no tax relief.

Budget agreement closed

The adoption of the new $27.2 billion budget was a closed process, as it has been in the past.

When the governor, House and Senate can't reach agreement, as often happens, leaders of each of the four caucuses appoint members of a House-Senate conference committee to hammer out an agreement.

Those meetings are open to the public, but the first and only meeting didn't take place until the evening of July 15. House Speaker Dennis O'Brien dragged his feet until then -- 15 days into the new fiscal year -- to name the three House members on the panel.

The Senate conferees had been appointed more than a week earlier, leading to complaints from Republicans that Mr. O'Brien was delaying progress on reaching a budget agreement.

By the time the public was admitted into the conference committee meeting, the nuts-and-bolts of the $27.2 billion agreement had already been hammered out in closed-door meetings.

The meeting began at 8:08 p.m. and ended before the second-hand made its way around the dial -- just long enough for the unanimous vote to be cast with no discussion. It made some people wonder about the "open-and-transparent" claims.

Mr. O'Brien later said he was "conscious of the public's perception" raised when he delayed naming conferees, but said he doesn't regret the decision.

"The process provided for necessary discussion," he said. "Every leader could participate in the discussion. When you appoint a conference committee, discussion is open to a limited number of people.''

But Mr. Potts isn't buying it. Billion-dollar topics like the general fund budget, transportation and economic development "need a bigger discussion among all the people of Pennsylvania. I'd still flunk them on their new procedures. I don't think they've done anything to improve citizen access to government."