Pa. House GOP drives toward bill at budget deadline
HARRISBURG – With just days until Pennsylvania’s fiscal-year budget deadline, the House Republican majority drove toward an approximately $31.5 billion spending plan and a package of tax increases on tobacco products whose support from Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf and the Senate was uncertain.
The plan also includes legislation pending in the House to make Pennsylvania the fourth state to allow casino-style gambling online in a bid to raise more for the state treasury.
House Majority Leader Dave Reed, R-Indiana, said he hoped to advance a budget bill through the Appropriations Committee late Monday night, setting it up for action in the House and Senate later in the week.
Many details remained unclear, and the package outlined by Reed appears to fall short of Wolf’s latest request.
“We are doing our very best to try to put a product on the table that meets the criteria of what he’s put forth,” Reed told reporters in a brief interview Monday between meetings in the Pennsylvania Capitol.
Wolf’s press secretary, Jeff Sheridan, said the governor had not agreed to the plan outlined by Reed and still hoped to work with lawmakers to accomplish his budget goals.
Senate Majority Leader Jake Corman, R-Centre, said he had not agreed to the House GOP’s spending proposal, or their plan to support it with across-the-board tax increases on tobacco products. It also lacked wider agreement in the Capitol, Corman said.
“If we want to be out of here June 30, there’s no sense sending the governor something that he doesn’t want, or at least won’t agree to sign, and we can go down that road if we get to the point where we can’t agree, but I think we’re close enough we probably could agree if we just finalized it,” Corman said.
Meanwhile, Senate Minority Leader Jay Costa, D-Allegheny, said the House GOP plan does not include money sought by Wolf and Democrats for distressed school districts, higher education institutions or heroin addiction treatment. Costa also said the House GOP plan to fund the budget is inadequate by hundreds of millions of dollars.
“What we know of this bill, we can’t support this measure right now,” Costa said.
Pennsylvania state government’s 2016-17 fiscal year starts Friday. Efforts ahead of the deadline to pass a budget come in the shadow of a record-breaking partisan budget stalemate in Wolf’s first budget year.
In any case, House Republicans have squeezed significant concessions from Wolf, who in February proposed a $33.3 billion spending plan a 10 percent increase backed by a $2.7 billion tax plan that also called for higher taxes on income, sales and Marcellus Shale natural gas drilling.
That had included a proposal to raise the per-pack cigarette tax to $2.60, from $1.60, and to extend a 40 percent wholesale tax to sales of larger cigars, loose tobacco, smokeless tobacco and electronic cigarettes. Those products are currently untaxed by Pennsylvania.
The House GOP’s $31.5 billion budget would amount to a 5 percent increase. It would include $200 million more, a 3 percent increase, for public schools operations and instruction, Reed said.
In recent weeks, Wolf and Democrats pressed for a budget of about $31.9 billion, or 6 percent higher. That had included $250 million extra for public schools, or about 4 percent more, and enough money to balance a long-term deficit projected at $1.8 billion in the 2016-17 fiscal year by the Legislature’s Independent Fiscal Office.
House Republicans had not unveiled budget legislation by Monday evening, and Reed said some details such as the size of the tax increase on cigarettes were still being worked out. Reed also did not say precisely which other tobacco products will be part of the House GOP plan.
Pennsylvania’s $1.60 per pack tax on cigarettes is tied for the nation’s 23rd highest with Ohio and Delaware, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. Increasing it by $1 to $2.60 would make it the nation’s 10th highest cigarette tax.