Pa. taxpayers fume over midnight raise

“The hope is do it, get it done ... have people forget about it,” said Don Kettl, director of the Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania.

Unlike 24 other states, Pennsylvania does not allow voters to try to override the Legislature by petitioning for a statewide ballot.

“It’s a cabal over there,” said Bob Durgin at WHP-Radio in Harrisburg, who has gathered more than 12,000 petition signatures and is organizing an anti-raise rally to greet lawmakers when they return from vacation. “It’s just a secret little society that does business behind closed doors.”

Media accused of overplaying story
House Speaker John Perzel, a Republican, defended the Legislature’s handling of the raises and accused the news media of overplaying the story.

“It’s been a slow news month,” Perzel said.

He and other supporters of the law say legislators were underpaid and that the raise merely brings their salaries in line with other top officials in the state.

The law links the present and future salaries of top officials in state government to similar posts in the federal government. Legislators’ $81,050 base salary is 50 percent of a U.S. representative’s salary. State Supreme Court justices get the same $171,800 as a U.S. circuit judge.

The raises also mean fatter pensions for lawmakers — at least $10,000 more per year for those retiring in 2008 — on top of already generous benefits, including as much as $7,800 a year in vehicle expenses and more than $125 a day for lawmakers who live more than 50 miles from the capital.

Adding insult to injury
Since the 2 a.m. vote on July 7, a number of developments have further agitated voters.

In a show of party discipline, the Democratic leader in the Republican-controlled House ousted from committee posts more than a dozen Democrats who voted against the bill. In their place, he put only those who voted for it, entitling them to extra leadership pay.

Pennsylvania’s chief justice, Ralph J. Cappy, dismissed as “knee-jerk” the negative reaction to the pay-raise plan, which he helped draw up. Taken to task over his remarks by the Philadelphia Daily News, Cappy allowed that he “probably used inappropriate words.”

A lawsuit has been filed in state court challenging the legality of paying the raises early as unvouchered expenses, though no hearing date has been set. A ruling against the unvouchered expenses would nullify the entire law, including the raises.

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