A similar bill would become law after another two years, said David Hess, a former Department of Environmental Protection chief who was then a legislative liaison. At the time, the state Senate said the original mining bill had been “just forgotten because it was the end of the session,” Hess told Spotlight PA in an email.
But in this scenario, if state Senate leadership continues to refuse to sign the budget bill, Pennsylvania will be without an enacted spending plan for several months, a delay that could lead to some public services running out of money.
Pennsylvania has faced longer impasses than the current seven-day deadlock, and the significant effects aren’t immediate. Even without a budget, the commonwealth is legally required to keep paying state workers and to fund entitlement programs like Medicaid.
However, local government entities that receive state dollars could start to feel the effects within a few months.
Lisa Schaefer, executive director of the County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania, said that counties’ human services, including child welfare and mental health resources, will likely be strained by August without a state budget.
Mackenzie Christiana, spokesperson for the Pennsylvania School Boards Association, said in an email that the impact won’t be apparent until the start of the school year, and will vary district to district depending on each one’s reserves.
“A drawn-out budget impasse also has the potential to present cash flow issues for school districts,” Christiana told Spotlight PA in an email. “As state subsidies are not flowing in, school districts still need to find money to pay salaries, utilities, and other mandated costs.”
Solving that funding conundrum, Christiana noted, could include either taking out loans or cutting services.
The other issue standing in the way of a budget resolution is the set of code bills that are traditionally passed alongside budget appropriations to direct how money is disbursed. They amend the state laws that control taxation, spending, education, welfare, and other public services.
At least one code bill, the fiscal code, must pass annually to update the state’s spending authority for the new fiscal year. But the package is usually much, much broader. Along with enacting spending, codes function as omnibus vehicles to make policy tweaks and fund local projects in one fell swoop amid hectic budget talks.
Past code bills have included measures preempting local governments from banning plastic bags, allowing college athletes to sign endorsement deals, and approving the use of electric scooters in Pittsburgh.
Code bills can also be useful political tools. They frequently include sweetheart language giving extra funding to select school districts, hospitals, or other local organizations to win over the support of key lawmakers. Such deals are akin to federal earmarks and are referred to as “walking around money,” or WAMs, in Harrisburg.
But unless state House Democrats and state Senate Republicans can come to an agreement on what to include, which could be tricky given the acrimony currently engulfing Harrisburg, the budget will remain unfinished.
The tension can be traced to late June, when Shapiro’s administration sent a letter to the state Senate affirming the governor’s support for private school vouchers for students in low-performing districts.
Republicans, many of whom receive large campaign checks from school choice backers, seized on that public support and added $100 million in vouchers to the budget bill they negotiated with Shapiro. They passed it before the June 30 deadline with a 29 to 21 vote. Just one state Senate Democrat supported the measure.
The inclusion of vouchers, state Senate Republicans claimed, allowed them to justify backing higher state spending than they would have liked. But state House Democrats, backed by their allies in organized labor such as teachers unions, dug in their heels and refused to vote for a budget with voucher funding.