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Health & Fitness

The Latest Follies of the Pennsylvania General Assembly - Gutting a Good Transportation Bill

The extent to which the Pennsylvania General Assembly is willing to stick its thumb in the eye of the public is breathtaking, and it is on display most recently through a State House Committee’s attempt to gum up the works in the passage of a transportation funding bill at the eleventh hour before a long summer recess is to occur.

 

Governor Corbett’s own blue-ribbon commission formulated a viable plan to raise the $3.5 billion per year it concluded was necessary to properly fund road and bridge maintenance and public transit.  He ignored his commission’s findings for an extended period of time, but ultimately came to conclude that a significant increase in funding was necessary.

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The State Senate recently passed a $2.5 billion per year plan by an overwhelming 45-5 margin, which included hikes in drivers license and registration fees, uncapping a levy on fuel which would likely lead to an increase in the cost of gasoline, and adding a $100 surcharge to moving violation citations.

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A House Committee has radically altered the bill, stripping out most of the Senate provisions while adding poison pills, requiring that money for transit come from local sources, enabling increases in local income, sales, or real estate transfer taxes, while knocking the plan down to one which raises $2 billion per year, little more than half the amount originally proposed by the governor’s committee.

 

Reasonable Pennsylvania from all social strata and both sides of the aisle, including small and large business owners, and those that have traditionally argued against higher taxes (including me) understand that it is penny-wise and pound-foolish to neglect our thousands of structurally deficient bridges, crumbling and obsolete roads, and that great cities do not exist without viable public transit systems.  A bill which had something for everyone passed the Senate and clearly would have been signed by the governor, but the House Committee version will be difficult to reconcile with the Senate product and is highly flawed.

 

If a good bill is not passed by Sunday, the end of the fiscal year, our legislative “leaders” can and will be held accountable for fiddling while the Commonwealth burns.  May God help them and us if their inaction leads to an instance of vehicles plunging off a rotted bridge into a body of water or onto concrete.  Such man-made disaster is looking increasingly likely.  How can legislative bodies be this dysfunctional?
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