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How in the name of all that is holy can you spend $84.5 million in just 101 days?
"It's stunning, isn't it?'' state Rep. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat from suburban Philadelphia, replied when I asked.
That's how much America's Largest Full-Time State Legislature spent this past summer and fall while dawdling over the only real job its 253 members have.
That would be passing a budget on time. It came in more than three months late.
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The daily tab for tardiness came to almost $837,000. That covered all the costs -- salaries, perks, travel, utilities, printing, mail, phones -- for the House, the Senate, their office staff and the various agencies that support them: the Legislative Budget and Finance Commission, the Legislative Reference Bureau, the Department of Redundancy Department, etc.
OK, I made that last department up. But it costs a fortune to keep the Capitol functioning while its dysfunctional members are stuck in neutral.
There are at least two scandals here. The first is the obvious one, that spending nearly $6 million a week, or $25 million a month, just to have a Legislature is ridiculous.
The secondary scandal is that the legislators don't believe that $85 million is enough of a cushion. They keep around $200 million of our tax money stashed in the legislative surplus fund.
That number is slippery, as you might expect, but when the Legislature belatedly passed the state budget and Gov. Ed Rendell signed it Oct. 9, the lawmakers replenished their slush fund.
That's right. Though the budget passed more than three months late, the line item from the General Assembly appropriation was cut only 8 percent. This seemed awfully generous, given there were only nine months left to fund.
So, essentially, the legislative surplus fund, which ended the fiscal year on June 30 with $201 million, was right about where it started.
That's disgusting.
"I went into politics because I'm lousy at math, and maybe that's why you're in journalism,'' Rep. Shapiro told me over the phone, realizing he was giving me and my readers headaches with these numbers.
As chairman of the Legislative Audit Advisory Commission, he would like to see the legislative surplus fund slashed by roughly two-thirds.
"This is real money and it belongs to the taxpayers and should go to their needs,'' he said.
Indeed. Even by the chronically low standards of our state Legislature, 2009 was a particularly abysmal year, the worst case of fiscal procrastination in the past 100 years, according to Mr. Shapiro.
So call it the 100-year flub. The lawmakers' insurance policy goes way beyond covering the 100-year-flub. Even if lawmakers need this insurance money to withstand a budget impasse and keep functioning (using that term very loosely), there certainly needn't be $200 million to cover even the worst performance in any given century.
Rep. Shapiro proposes cutting that fund to $50 million or $75 million, enough to cover two or three months if a budget isn't passed before the end of a fiscal year. Such a cut might better focus the lawmakers' minds.
"The budget could have been wrapped up much sooner had the unlimited surplus not been there,'' he said.
He's absolutely right, just as he was a year ago when I wrote a column headlined "The soft corruption of Harrisburg's slush fund,'' and he proposed the same cuts. Obviously, our insatiable, 253-headed Legislature cannot reform itself. In a year punctuated by state legislators in handcuffs, it remains clear that, just as on Wall Street, much of what is legal in Harrisburg is also corrupt.
The only way to reform our incorrigible statehouse is to scare it toward reform. Democracy Rising Pennsylvania is pushing a petition for a state constitutional convention. That can be accessed online via its Web site, www.democracyrisingpa.com, or by requesting a petition from the organization at P.O. Box 618, Carlisle, Pa. 17013.
At last count a few days ago, more than 1,600 Pennsylvanians had signed the petition, more than half of them from the Pittsburgh metropolitan area.
The goal is a statewide referendum in November 2010 to authorize a convention. It would be nice to end a year proud to be a Pennsylvanian.
Maybe next year.
