State legislators trying to strip the executive branch of much of its discretion regarding emergency management have complained that the Wolf administration has been insufficiently transparent in its handling of the COVID-19 public health crisis.
There is some truth to that. But legislators would have more credibility on matters of transparency if they were transparent themselves about their own spending and legislative operations.
Instead, they have exempted the Legislature from the state Right to Know Law, which applies to executive branch agencies and every local government and school district.
And most of them have rejected the use of modern tools to ensure easy public access to records of their own spending.
Spotlight PA, a news organization that covers state government, reported this week that it encountered an array of barriers to public disclosure when it attempted to analyze $203 million of legislators’ expense spending from 2017 through 2020.
Lawmakers and their caucus machinery released partial information, redacted legitimate public information, released data in unsearchable formats and used an appeals process for rejected records requests in which lawmakers picked their own caucus lawyers to act as “judges.”
Following a statewide grand jury report in 2010 that exposed an array of expense spending abuses by multiple legislators, many lawmakers vowed to post their expenses online in real time rather than hiding them within the Legislature’s convoluted reporting process.
Spotlight PA, however, found that only 18 of 203 representatives and 11 of 50 senators have such reporting sites, and some of those post only partial records. And it noted that one of the sites, that of Senate President Pro Tempore Jake Corman of Centre County, has not been updated in six years.
Pennsylvania has the largest full-time and second most expensive state legislature. Taxpayers simply have the right to know how those 253 legislators and 3,000 staffers spend hundreds of millions of public dollars every year.
Congress requires members to post their expenses online on a regular schedule. There is no reason in 2021 that Pennsylvania cannot do likewise.
— Republican & Herald, Pottsville/TNS
