Dec 5, 2017 3 min read

Last month, the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology made some hearts race a little faster when they announced new guidelines for high blood pressure that will effectively increase the number of Americans who will need to deal with the condition.

Here in Pennsylvania, the blood pressure of quite a few folks undoubtedly shot well past the now-too-high 130/80 when they saw that lawmakers in Harrisburg would be receiving a 0.81 percent salary increase starting this month, boosting the typical legislator’s annual earnings to a little more than $87,000. Some lawmakers and Gov. Tom Wolf donate part or all of their salaries to charity, but it can still smart when lawmakers who can’t cobble a budget together on time get regular pay raises when real wages for many of their constituents have stagnated. According to Business Insider columnist Pedro Nicolaci da Costa, the real wages of most Americans have gone up just 0.2 percent in the last 44 years. That, as da Costa put it, is “basically nothing.”

The pay raises state senators and representatives received are all the more nettlesome in light of evidence the commonwealth is not hitting on all cylinders, and that’s putting aside the almost yearly budget follies. For some examples, look no further than the software problems bedeviling state agencies that were outlined in a story published recently by Philly.com.

According to the website, benefits were paid by the Department of Human Services to “a couple thousand” residents who were no longer here to cash the checks because they are dead. That happened because computer systems “failed to flag them as ineligible, auditors found last year.” Last week, the phones shut down in the commonwealth’s unemployment compensation offices because they rely on software that was crafted when “Barney Miller” and “WKRP in Cincinnati” were on television in prime time. A replacement system that cost $160 million failed.

Then, there’s the case of the Pennsylvania Statewide Radio Network, which still is not fully up to speed, despite $800 million having been expended on it since the 1990s, four times the original projections.

It’s snafus like these that have prompted state Rep. Seth Grove, a York Republican, to propose Pennsylvania consolidate its information technology offices under one umbrella, making it part of the governor’s Office of Administration. This, in Grove’s assessment, would ensure taxpayers get better value for their money, and shoddy work is not rewarded.

Because IT personnel are scattered throughout various agencies, “We do not know how much money we spend on information technology,” Grove told Philly.com. “How many projects are out there? Are they on budget? Are we meeting their timeline? … And we don’t know how much they are spending on consultants. There are so many consultants. We hire consultants to watch the consultants.”

Certainly, people have been complaining about government and its orderliness, or lack thereof, probably since Aristotle published “Politics” in the 4th century BC. Creating something like an all-encompassing information technology office, like the one Grove has proposed, would at least bring Pennsylvania a step closer to something approximating efficiency. And make lawmakers more worthy of those raises.