Legislature's midterm report card: an incomplete

By MARK SCOLFORO

- Associated Press Writer

HARRISBURG, Pa. — Last Tuesday's voting marked the midpoint in Pennsylvania's two-year legislative cycle. For the next 12 months, nothing will happen in Harrisburg without incumbent lawmakers first thinking hard about their own looming re-election races and the contest to replace Gov. Ed Rendell.

The conventional wisdom is that means not much at all is likely to happen.

Campaign considerations - and the likelihood that tax revenues will continue to be anemic - raise the distinct possibility that the recently concluded Great Budget Drama of '09 was just the first act in a two-part battle of wills.

It's not as if there is no ambition to accomplish things over the next 12 months.

For one, the budget impasse never really ended, because negotiators failed to work out the fine points of legalizing table games, and that is holding up massive state subsidies for the University of Pittsburgh, Penn State, Temple and Lincoln - the four state-related universities. A consensus could emerge before the end of the year.

Lawmakers also may do something to cushion the blow to consumers as caps come off electric rates and the utilities raise bills, although indications are that any relief would be modest.

Many want to address the pension crisis - a time bomb set to go off in just a couple of years that is likely to saddle state government and school districts around Pennsylvania with crippling new financial obligations.

In the Republican-dominated Senate, the wish list includes revising the charter school law, re-examining public school funding, improving the welfare system and banning texting behind the wheel.

The focus for Democrats who hold a majority in the House of Representatives includes lowering property taxes, increasing funding for college costs and imposing a levy on natural gas extraction.

"For us, it's always been about access to health care, access to education, job creation," House Majority Leader Todd Eachus said Friday. "These are the types of things we're going to continue to fight for, even if they need to be smaller and more innovative."

Rendell, entering his eighth and final year as governor, said he does not expect any major departures from his established priorities.

A prodigious fundraiser himself, Rendell said the need for campaign finance changes was highlighted by the budget impasse and particularly the resistance he encountered in the Legislature to proposals to expand the sales tax to cover more items.

"I think we've seen in this process again the power of the special interests, and that power comes in great part from campaign contributions and we ought to do something to curtail that," he said.

There have been accomplishments outside of the budget this year, but the list is short and they are not the sorts of things anyone is likely to be still talking about a few years from now.

Lawmakers passed an extension of unemployment benefits, cracked down on mortgage fraud and expanded health insurance eligibility for people working in small businesses who lose or leave their jobs.

They changed cigarette manufacturing standards to reduce the danger of fires, tweaked child pornography laws to close a loophole opened by a court ruling, increased hunting and trapping fees and established a panel to look into the broader implications of the "kids for cash" juvenile justice scandal in Luzerne County.

They also reauthorized a government agency that studies health care costs, limited the types of surgical procedures on dogs that non-veterinarians can perform, established a new system to license massage therapists and took a small step toward revamping Pennsylvania's troubled system of elected and appointed constables.

And they saved Philadelphia from the brink of financial collapse and gave municipal pensions some breathing room.

But that 101-day budget impasse set out in vivid relief the difficulty involved in getting anything through the ideologically divided and politically calculating General Assembly. It's a fair guess that any change to come out of Harrisburg in 2010 will be incremental.

After all, the state Legislature is where even a proposal to name the box turtle Pennsylvania's official reptile, a measure conceived and pushed by an adorable class of fourth-graders, turned contentious this year.

The rattlesnake had its supporters.