Pennsylvania’s state Capitol building in Harrisburg, seen here on Election Day 2022, will be home to many new lawmakers in January.
Amanda Berg / Spotlight PA
Pennsylvania three-week budget impasse is different than in the past, but how?
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Scott LaMar
Amanda Berg / Spotlight PA
Pennsylvania’s state Capitol building in Harrisburg, seen here on Election Day 2022, will be home to many new lawmakers in January.
Airdate: July 21st, 2023
Pennsylvania’s fiscal year 2023-24 state budget is now three weeks late. Budgets not approved by the General Assembly and signed by the governor are fairly commonplace in Pennsylvania. In the past 20 years, 13 budgets have been approved after the June 30th deadline.
But this year is different.
A $45.5 billion spending plan has been passed by both the House and Senate, but the Senate with a Republican majority, won’t sign off on the budget because they claim Shapiro reneged on a deal to create a state-funded private school voucher program.
Spotlight PA’s Stephen Caruso this week reported on past budget impasses and was on The Spark Friday to see if we can learn anything from history and told us,”Governor Shapiro’s promise to veto $100 million for school vouchers, the state Senate, who is really pushing this in the state Senate controlled by Republicans, that was the top priority for them. So they are refusing to convene and do the small procedural step of signing the bill. It’s not signing into law, but it says in our Constitution, after bills passed both chambers, this is procedural technicality, ministerial action of sign it to be like, this is the right text. And then it goes to make that final call. All they have to do is come in to session and the lieutenant governor would sign that bill, but they haven’t done that.”
The Senate is not scheduled to reconvene until September.
Caruso said history shows the length of a budget impasse often determines how pain there will be,”School districts are obviously one of the biggest examples, but also county governments who provide mental health services, alcohol treatment, child welfare services, those are going to suddenly start being like we don’t have money. And then once you add on the fact that some of these services counties haven’t received increases, they’ve just been kind of flat funded for year after year, there’s just not a lot of money to go around. So you can muddle through July without a budget. And that’s why I think you can probably get up to July 30th. And most people, I think, would agree that, things should be fine. But once you get to August, September, October, November, like we have in the past, suddenly a lot of these local services where people will notice.”
Caruso pointed out that one of the big differences between this year’s impasses and those from a decade ago is that state workers are paid. Up until a 2010 court ruling, state workers would come to work during an impasse and not get paid. That put pressure on lawmakers to get a budget finalized. Caruso said he talked with veterans of past impasses that said that pressure isn’t there any more.
