20 years after pay raise scandal, reformers say Harrisburg still lacks transparency and integrity

• By Jaxon White/LNP | LancasterOnline

In the early morning hours of July 7, 2005, Tim Potts was on a flight to London for a vacation with his wife.

At the time, Potts was working to lobby the General Assembly on reforming Pennsylvania’s education system, and in the closing days of the 2005 budget fight, he had heard whispers that state lawmakers would soon vote to give themselves a pay raise.

Potts said a reporter told him there was nothing in writing for the public to see. Thinking the rumor was just that, a rumor, he left for London.

But by the time he landed, Pennsylvania’s legislators, without debate, had given themselves a 16% to 34% pay hike, with the amount depending on seniority, rank and title. The package, signed almost immediately by Gov. Ed Rendell, also included raises for state judges and officials in the executive branch.

Voted on at 2 a.m., the big raise captured the attention of government watchdogs like Potts.

“There is something fundamentally wrong when legislation of that magnitude can escape the attention and the opportunity for discussion with somebody who’s paying attention as hard as he possibly can,” Potts said, reflecting on the events of 20 years ago.

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Potts and other activists soon mounted a statewide campaign to organize public outrage over the big raise.

Come November, for the first and only time in state history, voters removed a Pennsylvania Supreme Court judge, Russell Nigro, from the bench. His ouster was widely seen as a referendum on the change voters demanded in Harrisburg, given that no legislators were on the ballot that year.

The anti-incumbency campaign carried into 2006, despite lawmakers’ nearly unanimous vote to repeal the raise just a few months after it was passed. More than 50 legislators — almost one-fifth of the 253-member General Assembly — either lost their seats to a challenger in that year’s primary and general elections, or chose not to seek reelection.

“We saw huge upheaval, massive turnover, and I think that was probably healthy at the time,” Gov. Josh Shapiro told LNP | LancasterOnline. The pay raise was approved when Shapiro was a freshman House member from Montgomery County. He joined 78 other House members in voting against it.

That the Legislature passed it, he said, “was an example where the people were not put first.”

After voters punished many lawmakers in the 2006 election, Shapiro was tapped to co-chair a special commission tasked with making recommendations for reforming the Legislature that was created largely in response to the public blowback.

Some of those suggestions became law and remain on the books today, including an 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. working window for votes to be held in either chamber and a requirement that roll call and committee votes be posted online.

Shapiro said many of the recommendations have endured because they boosted transparency for voters and lawmakers alike. He highlighted one recommendation to ensure lawmakers had ample time to view a bill before taking a vote.

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But the minimum time for lawmakers to review a bill before a vote has eroded from the reform commission’s recommended 24 hours to just three hours. That erosion was one example some advocates cited to argue that transparency in the two decades since the pay raise hasn’t actually improved much in the state Capitol.

“We have not done nearly enough to change the way Harrisburg functions. It is still a place where public integrity often goes to die,” Potts said.

‘Lose the peace’

The 2005 vote was the first for a pay raise since 1995, when then-Gov. Tom Ridge signed a bill providing an inflation-linked cost-of-living adjustment for lawmakers, judges and top executives.

The new raise was designed to get around a provision in the Pennsylvania Constitution barring lawmakers from giving themselves a raise mid-term. The bill Rendell signed was written to consider the raises as “unvouchered expenses,” allowing legislators to take the extra cash immediately.

Gene Stilp, a Dauphin County activist and non-practicing attorney, soon filed a lawsuit challenging the legality of the 2005 pay raise. His case made it to the state Supreme Court, which ruled partly in his favor. Everyone’s pay raises were deemed illegal, except for those belonging to the judiciary.

Interviewed on the Capitol steps in June, Stilp said the post-pay raise reforms were unsuccessful in achieving long-lasting change in the Legislature.

“It’s like a giant, well-protected amoeba that changes shape to protect its own survival,” Stilp said of the General Assembly.

Lawmakers still receive cost-of-living pay raises every year without casting a vote, Stilp noted, and he criticized legislators’ health benefits for being one of the most lavish in the country.

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It was on the Capitol steps during a September 2005 “Rock the Capitol” protest that Stilp flew a 25-foot-long inflatable pink pig that became the symbol of the anti-pay raise movement. He brought that pig to several other protests outside of lawmakers’ offices around the state to raise awareness and stoke public anger over the pay raise.

The protest was a joint effort by Eric Epstein’s grassroots activist organization Rock the Capitol, Tim Potts’ since-defunct Democracy Rising PA, Russ Diamond’s anti-incumbency Clean Sweep PA, and other organizations angered by the raise.

Of the activists, Epstein was perhaps most cynical about the fate of the reforms passed in the wake of the pay raise.

“You can win the war and lose the peace,” Epstein said in a June interview, rubbing his head with his hands. “It was bitter and brutal and just did not create the lasting change. … Maybe we missed an opportunity, I don’t know.”

He heavily criticized the Legislature and other state departments for leveraging Pennsylvania’s open records law to delay returning documents to requestors.

Epstein still leads Rock the Capitol as a government watchdog group. On July 7 – the 20th anniversary of the pay raise – he will reunite with Potts and Stilp for a press conference in the Capitol to highlight the “lack of legislative reforms” in the years since. (They’ll be joined by former Manheim Township Commissioner Barry Kauffman, a plaintiff in a federal case brought against the pay raise at the time as executive director of Common Cause of Pennsylvania.)

Epstein, Stilp and Potts also voiced disappointment with Shapiro’s record on government transparency.

Epstein was blunt: “He hasn’t said a [expletive] thing since.”

Asked what further reforms he would like to see in the General Assembly, Shapiro said it was up to lawmakers to decide whether more changes were necessary.

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Public outrage

Diamond is largely credited by the other activists as the tech-savvy messenger of the anti-incumbency movement sparked by the pay raise. His Clean Sweep PA website, they noted, successfully targeted the Supreme Court justice and a host of sitting lawmakers.

“The only thing that puts real pressure on people in this building is the threat of a challenge,” Diamond said during an interview in his Capitol office. Diamond has served as a state House member since winning a Lebanon County seat in 2014.

For their fight against the pay raise, Stilp, Potts and Diamond earned “Citizen of the Year” honors from the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2006.

Those who championed the pay raise, like Rep. Mike Veon, Senate Majority Leader David Brightbill and Senate President Pro Tempore Robert Jubelirer, each were ousted from their seats in 2006. Efforts to contact them were unsuccessful.

Their removal from office made way for a new generation of lawmakers to enter the Capitol after the 2006 election, including Drumore Township Republican Bryan Cutler.

Veon, a Beaver County Democrat, was the lone lawmaker from either chamber to oppose the successful repeal in November 2005.

Veon’s vote marked him for ouster, according to former Speaker of the House and then-Minority Leader Bill DeWeese, who survived a campaign challenger in 2006 after being targeted by the anti-incumbency movement.

“If the numbers had been more constrained, the results electorally and in the media would have been altered, and the reverberations would have been less catastrophic,” DeWeese said in a phone interview in June.

Yet after 20 years, DeWeese maintains that nothing “nefarious or secretive” happened to pass the pay raise and that the media used the 2 a.m. time of the vote to “demean and belittle” politicians.

Using his party leadership position, DeWeese punished 15 Democrats who had opposed the pay raise by stripping them of committee seats. DeWeese later served time in state prison on corruption charges after an investigation found that members of his official staff had been campaigning for DeWeese on taxpayers’ dime.

It was reelection pressure DeWeese faced from his support of the pay raise that may have led him to have official employees work on his campaign, according to retired veteran Capitol reporter Brad Bumsted in his 2013 book, “Keystone Corruption: A Pennsylvania Insider’s View of a State Gone Wrong.”

Bumsted, former bureau chief for LNP Media Group’s The Caucus, said in a June interview that he and many other reporters at the time of the pay raise pushback hadn’t expected the movement to be so effective in ousting lawmakers.

“We just totally underestimated the power of the internet and social media,” Bumsted said. “There were never any reform groups that we saw rise to the occasion in a big way.”

Bumsted said “cyclical corruption” appears in the Capitol and that lawmakers still abuse taxpayer money by inflating mileage reimbursements and taking per diems on top of their annual salaries — $110,000 for rank-and-file members.

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In the Legislature

Diamond has faced pushback from some of the reform advocates, like Stilp, for allegedly capitalizing on the anti-incumbency movement to gain public notoriety.

Stilp, who has led several of his own unsuccessful campaigns, called Diamond “a sellout” for entering office, then accepting the cost-of-living raise lawmakers receive every year and not introducing reform-minded proposals.

“This place works a lot different when you’re actually here, you know you have to actually try to get things done, and throwing rocks at all your colleagues is not the way to do it,” Diamond responded to Stilp’s criticisms.

Diamond said the biggest change to the Legislature since 2005 is a comparatively higher turnover rate among elected lawmakers. A regular crop of faces, in other words, affects how the General Assembly does its business.

To the criticisms that the automatic cost-of-living adjustments shield lawmakers from facing scrutiny for their pay raises, Diamond said he never opposed lawmakers receiving them.

“Why would you want that vote to happen every year?” he said.