Reforming the State Legislature: The Grand Jury Speaks. Is Anyone Listening?

By Gerald (Jerry) Policoff

This past May a Grand Jury investigating the Pennsylvania Legislature issued a scathing report documenting systematic problems in that body with particular emphasis on the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. The report received negligible media coverage, and has been all but ignored by the Legislature itself, but the findings and recommendations of that panel deserve serious consideration, especially in light of the budget crisis that grips our state.

A recent Quinnipiac poll found that only 25% of Pennsylvanians approve of the way the state legislature is handling its job -- down from 49% in 2003. In order to regain and keep the trust of its citizens the Pennsylvania Legislature must maintain the highest ethical standards, and its reputation should above reproach. A body that retains the confidence of only one in four Pennsylvanians is in dire need of serious reform.

The Grand Jury exposed specific examples of questionable conduct in Harrisburg as well as practices that would likely not be tolerated by Pennsylvania taxpayers if they were better reported upon by the news media.

The Grand Jury documented numerous examples of the Caucuses operating separate departments that could easily combined resulting in significant savings for the taxpayers of Pennsylvania.:

• Both the Democratic and Republican Caucuses, for example, operate their own print offices with nearly identical equipment and similar numbers of staff. Combining these two print offices into one would save approximately $3.3 million per year. The report noted that the State Senate employs a single print office that serves both Caucuses.
• Each of the 4 House and Senate Caucuses employs its own information technology (IT) department. The Grand Jury found that the House departments were "an ideal place to hide "questionable (i.e. campaign) expenditures from the prying eyes of the taxpayers." Both Caucuses also have their own Public Relations and Research staffs which both employ approximately 179 people.

Among the other findings:

• "at $78,314.66 per year (excluding perks and other benefits) Pennsylvania rank-and-file legislators enjoy one of the highest salaries in the country... the legislative leadership makes even more... up to $122,254.19 per year."
• "As currently constituted, each political party has a Caucus in each chamber of the Pennsylvania General Assembly..." These entities expend "more and more taxpayer resources with little or no benefit to the taxpayers of Pennsylvania."
• "Evidence presented to the Grand Jury established that there are currently 2,805 staff people employed by the Pennsylvania Legislature (author's note: other analysis' have placed the number at over 2900, and there is apparently some ambiguity as to the definition of "staff")... that equates to, on average, more than 9 support staff individuals for each state representative and 17… for each state senator. Despite the best efforts of numerous witnesses, nobody was able to justify such a large number of employees for this body. On the contrary, there was a virtual consensus among those who have worked inside the Legislature for many years that the number of employees could be significantly cut with no measurable decrease in the ability of each Member to perform his legislative duties and to serve his constituents."
• A high-ranking former member of the Democratic Caucus testified that only about 350 of that Caucus's 911 employees (38%) were truly necessary for tits daily operation. Another former high-ranking employee of that Caucus went even further, testifying that "you could probably operate... on one-quarter to one-third of the staff if properly organized...' "The accepted process for adding staff in the House of Representatives is to simply make the request to the Leader with no justification required. In some instances, the Grand Jury found, the reason "has been to compensate for the incompetence of existing staffers" with more staff rather than firing the incompetent workers. Similar estimates were provided regarding a former high-ranking member of the Republican Caucus who testified that 61% of the Republican Caucus's 475 staffers were not necessary. Those numbers did not include staffers employed in district offices outside Harrisburg. (Author's note: These numbers suggest that the Legislature could save taxpayers in excess of $100 million per year through staff reduction without impairing its ability to function.)
• The Grand Jury blamed the overstaffing problem on the patronage system that operates within the Legislature. "That process, over time, has contributed to the existence of hundreds of legislative employees who, although paid by the taxpayers to do legislative work, do campaign work on state time with state resources, or other non-legislative work instead of legitimate legislative work."
• At least 34 House of Representative staffers work exclusively on processing constituent paperwork with regard to the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT). These services are easily obtained from PennDOT itself, or from outside agencies such as AAA so there is no legitimate reason for the Legislature to provide them as well, at taxpayer expense. A separate department employing more than 30 people within PennDOT was tasked exclusively with working with the Legislature but to his credit, Governor Rendell dissolved that unit following the Grand Jury's report, much to the consternation of members of the legislature... The Grand Jury opined that the real reason the Legislature provided these services was to enhance their prospects for getting re-elected.
• Specifically, the Grand Jury cited a particularly shocking and questionable example of legislative excess involving the former Director of Human Resources of the Republican Caucus. She was earning an annual salary of $112,840 when she retired in June 2009. She immediately began receiving a pension, and was then immediately re-hired as a "consultant" at the identical $112,840 salary. Her former five-day work week was reduced to three. This same official had previously testified before the grand jury and told them that organization charts they had asked her to produce did not exist even though subsequent witnesses readily produced them.
• The Grand Jury noted that Legislators receive a tax-free per diem allotment ranging from $163 per day to $258 per day simply for showing up for work. These per diem payments are above and beyond salaries, mileage reimbursement, and other benefits and perks, and while earmarked to pay for food and lodging, no receipts are required to demonstrate that these expenses were actually incurred.
• The Grand Jury noted that even though the Legislature is officially a "full-time" body, the House was in session only 115 days in 2007; 147 days in 2009 (when the extended budget crisis delayed adjournment); and in the election years of 2006 and 2008 only 72 days in both years. Clearly the reduced number of official work days in election years (when the House is in session less than 20% of the time) amounts to paying Legislators to campaign for re-election rather than attend full-time to their legislative duties.
• The Grand Jury noted that the current two-year term for House members results in a state representative literally always running for re-election leaving inadequate time to focus on doing the job they were elected to do.
• The Grand Jury found that it was common practice to grant "comp time" to employees which is often not recorded. It hinted that comp time was used to free up staff to work on political campaigns while being paid by taxpayers. The former Director of Human Resources of the Republican Caucus referred to earlier invoked Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination in refusing to answer when asked about this practice.
• Split time is also reportedly common, where a staffer takes leave without pay and splits his or her time between being paid by the Caucus and campaign committee while retaining all House benefits. The Grand Jury noted that this practice results in taxpayers subsidizing the benefits of people working on re-election campaigns of incumbent legislator.

The Grand Jury made a number of recommendations including:

• Elimination of taxpayer funded political Caucuses
• Elimination of Special Leadership Accounts (commonly referred to as "Walking Around Money" or WAMS, or, at the very least, requiring that disbursements from such accounts be a matter of public record, open to public inspection. WAMS are little more than slush funds by which the Leadership of both parties reward legislators who loyally do their bidding by funding projects in their districts The practice was ruled unconstitutional in 1995 but continues to this day shrouded in secrecy.
• Enacting a procedure requiring routine full, independent audits of all legislative expenses and requiring that these audits be available to the public.
• Limiting each state representative to one taxpayer funded district office and equal staff for that office. (Larger districts can be served by regular visits to the various communities by the Legislator)
• A "Rank and File Member Bill of Rights" that explicitly states what each state representative should receive, including but not limited to equal staffing and resources for the member's district office.
• Elimination of per diem payments, to be replaced by actual reasonable reimbursement of actual expenses verified by receipts.
• Expansion of the two year House term to four years with mandatory term limits.
• Merging the six separate Democratic and Republican Caucus Print shops; IT departments and Human Resources Departments into three departments serving the entire House with commensurate reductions of equipment and staff.
• Elimination of all legislative "PennDOT specialists," and rules forbidding Legislative staff from engaging in PennDOT work.
• Legislative staffers who take leave to work on a campaign must have their salaries and benefits paid for in their entirety by the campaign rather than by taxpayers.
• The creation of standardized written ethics policies for the House and Senate with annual updates and initial ethics training administered by a bipartisan ethics oversight committee. None of this exists at present.
• At the end of the year all unused budget money must be returned to the state treasury rather than being doled to the Leadership for their discretionary use (as in "WAMS").

The Grand Jury determined that "the current hierarchy of the House is designed to bestow the vast majority of the power on a select few, to the detriment of other members of the House, as well as the public." Under the current system our elected representatives incur the displeasure of their Leadership at their peril, and the entire process ill-serves the people of the Commonwealth.