State budget negotiations at a standstill

MARK SCOLFORO Associated Press Writer

HARRISBURG — Pennsylvania budget negotiations reached a new level of meltdown Thursday as House Democrats accused their Republican counterparts of playing political games and announced an end to the latest round of closed-door meetings.

Speaker Keith McCall, D-Carbon, and Majority Leader Todd Eachus, D-Luzerne, said Senate Republicans undid weeks of work by offering a proposal on Wednesday that was about $500 million less than the figure they thought had been agreed to.

“To say that I’m disappointed is an understatement,” McCall said.

They said they would renew meetings next week of the six-member conference committee and said they planned to show how GOP opposition to tax increases has been driven by powerful business interests, specifically mentioning proposals to tax natural gas extraction or increase cigarette taxes.

Previous meetings of the conference committee, divided evenly by party and legislative chamber, were widely seen as an exercise in futility.

Democrats so far have talked about a range of potential sources to generate additional revenue but have not said exactly which ones they want to use to sustain the level of spending they support. McCall said that may soon change.

“If it gets to the point where we have to put up a budget with the revenues to pay for it, we would be willing to do that,” McCall said.

Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi, R-Delaware, told reporters after the Democratic news conference that he had never agreed to a $28 billion “spend” figure and rejected accusations that his side was bargaining in bad faith.

“If they don’t want to negotiate across the table, in the way budgets in Pennsylvania have been negotiated for the past 100 years, that’s their choice,” Pileggi said.

He said the major elements of the negotiations, such as the overall size of the budget or the revenue sources, can’t be separated from each other. The Democrats’ most recent statements suggested they were trying to delay the process, he said.

“We have been flexible on just about every aspect of the issues that are contained in the budget,” Pileggi said.

He said he was not willing to commit to participating in next week’s conference committee meetings before hearing what’s on the agenda.

Pennsylvania is nearly two months into its fiscal year without a comprehensive spending deal in place, although a stopgap budget was passed that is paying employees and authorizing a limited amount of other state government spending.