HARRISBURG
The much-ballyhooed effort in the General Assembly to strengthen the state's infamously weak Right to Know Law would not fix problems like legislative leaders' recent refusal to say how they spent $360 million.
First of all, the Right to Know Law enhancements may or may not even happen this fall. It's been all talk and no action so far. But it would take an overhaul of the state's equally weak Sunshine Law to prevent caucus leaders of both parties, along with the governor's staff, from meeting secretly to carve up more than $27.5 billion in overall state sending.
The Right to Know Law is an open records act. The Sunshine Law is an open meetings act. They should work in tandem to keep the public clued in to the details of what's going on in state government. Instead they work together to keep the Legislature's most important work secret.
The Legislature exempted itself from the Right to Know Law. Committee meetings and General Assembly sessions are required to be open. But lawmakers made sure the open meetings act does not apply to their own caucus meetings, where much of the sausage-making takes place.
Nothing in the law prevents the handful of leaders and the governor's top aides from meeting behind closed doors to put the budget together.
Any new open records act isn't likely to cover "work product" so it will tell us virtually nothing about closed-door budget sessions. It would take a super-strict Sunshine Law to prevent secret budget meetings.
Now to that $360 million.
That's largely grant money that the four caucus leaders -- House and Senate Republicans and Democrats -- divvied up at the end of the budget process. It's money for research facilities, nonprofits and municipalities for a wide range of purposes. It includes at least $40 million in so-called WAMs (Walking Around Money) -- discretionary grants through the state Department of Community and Economic Development.
Consider it incumbent-protection, bacon-delivering money.
The Associated Press recently pressed all four caucuses to designate how they spent their share of the money. They refused.
Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi, R-Delaware, told the Trib that it's all in the budget for public scrutiny. Technically, he's right. But you first must know what you're looking for.
Bottom line: Legislative leaders haven't "owned" their budget priorities; they haven't been accountable for their actions by saying what they decided to spend.
Pennsylvania has a public process for approving a budget: a House-Senate conference committee. That could have worked, although nothing in the law prevents the leaders from sidestepping it and working out a deal ahead of time.
House leaders dragged their feet in naming appointees to the conference committee, which met less than five minutes before approving a budget.
Pileggi says the conference committee could have given Pennsylvania an open budget forum. And to his credit, he's an author of an open records bill.
Still, the rhetoric about openness and transparency has largely been just that -- a sham. They are not even talking about Sunshine Law reform.
Here's what it's all about: Some legislative leaders and many lawmakers want to outlast the reformers.
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