Taxpayers foot huge bill to run Pa.’s full-time legislature, but are blocked from many details – By Angela Couloumbis of Spotlight PA and Mike Wereschagin, Brad Bumsted, and Sam Janesch of The Caucus (The Philadelphia Inquirer) / May 12 2021
Over the next year, The Caucus and Spotlight PA will examine and make public specific areas of spending by the legislature as part of their ongoing efforts to follow the money and track taxpayer dollars. Sign up for Spotlight PA’s newsletters · Spotlight PA
HARRISBURG — The Pennsylvania legislature got to work at 1 p.m. on March 18, 2019.
Three and a half hours later on that Monday afternoon, lawmakers had adjourned.
They passed eight bills, four of which eventually became law and none of which was controversial or particularly groundbreaking. One established a promotional board for distilled spirits. Two dealt with agricultural conservation easements.
Lawmakers’ short workday cost taxpayers $133,219.23 — more than twice the median household income of their constituents. That doesn’t include the day’s portion of their $90,000 salaries, or the thousands more spent to fund their health care and pension benefits. Nor does it include the compensation for the army of aides who staff the nation’s largest full-time state legislature.
The money, tucked in an array of expense accounts with little transparency, is a sliver of the $203 million total the General Assembly spent from 2017 through 2020 just to feed, house, transport, and provide rental offices and other perks for lawmakers and their staffs, according to a database of nearly 400,000 transactions created by The Caucus and Spotlight PA during a year-long investigation. That averages to more than $51 million a year.
About one in 10 of those dollars — $20 million in all over the four years — went into lawmakers’ pockets in the form of reimbursements for meals, mileage subsidies, per diems, and other expenses. That’s on top of salaries that are already among the highest of any legislature in the nation, dinners on the dime of lobbyists and industry groups, and access to campaign war chests that some have used for everything from a new pair of sneakers to a jaunt through Europe.
