Pittsburgh — Tom Corbett unveiled his plan Wednesday to privatize the state’s liquor stores, one of the most ambitious attempts by a Pa. Governor in decades.
“I am proposing that Pennsylvania join the ranks of 48 other states and once and for all get out of the business of selling wine and spirits,” he said. “I do not simply want to reduce it or to trim it a little here and a little there… we should not do it halfway.”
Flanked by Pa. House Majority Leader Mike Turzai – a longtime proponent of privatization – and a dozen other Republican state Reps., Corbett laid out the details.
Some of the main points:
As the Guv said, it’s not a halfway plan. It’s a full privatization effort – dissolving the 600 state stores and auctioning off 1,200 licenses for the sale of liquor and wine.
Other licenses, for beer and wine, won’t have a set number but will be granted based on whether the seller (including box stores, groceries, restaurants, bars, convenience stores, etc) met certain criteria.
Current beer distributors can keep their current license, apply to sell wine, or participate in auctions for liquor licenses.
Businesses that hire current Pa. liquor store employees would be eligible for a tax credit.
The new, private stores and wholesalers would continue to use the current tax system.
The entire program would phase in over 4 years.
Corbett appeared to be making a play mostly for Republican support – or at least to give his party political cover. The proposal almost certainly will define the rightmost option in the forthcoming debate.
He has his work cut out for him. Turzai notwithstanding, several legislative leaders in his party – including House Speaker Sam Smith and Senate Pro Tempore Joe Scarnati – have expressed reluctance about privatization in recent days.
Both Smith and Scarnati suggested the current system is working and said they’d support more restrained reforms – ones that better guaranteed rural places like their home County of Jefferson maintains retailers.
Corbett’s key olive branch to Democrats (and potentially vulnerable Republicans): $1 billion in new funding for K-12 education. The grants would be funded by revenue from the license sales and taxes, and directed to a limited range of functions (most notably not regular budgetary needs, such as salaries).
But he can expect stiff resistance. Democratic lawmakers and allied groups lambasted the plan immediately – including Corbett’s estimates of increased revenue.
Sen. Jim Ferlo (D-Allegheny) is the ranking Democrat on the Pa. Senate Law & Justice Committee where any legislation will originate.
“We do not need to tear down a system that works, provides good paying, middle-class jobs, and generates essential revenue for the State as the Governor is proposing. We need to improve that system to the benefit of consumers while continuing to take advantage of the important resources and public health protections the system provides today,” he said.
Ferlo praised Scarnati, who earlier this week similarly called for tweaks to the current system.
Corbett said it wasn’t time for half-measures.
“We’ve been nipping and tucking away at this. This is time to go and do it,” he said.
Numerous polls have shown solid public support for privatization, including a survey commissioned by the Philadelphia Inquirerin October (55% supported, 28% opposed).
If Pa. voters had their say today, three of President Obama’s top gun control priorities would become law.
According to the latest poll from Quinnipiac, Pa. has near-unanimous public support for universal background checks (95% to 5%) and healthy support for a ban on assault weapons (60% to 37%) and high capacity magazine clips (59% to 39%).
Respondents who identified as gun owners also supported universal background checks (95% to 4%) but opposed an assault weapons ban (51% to 45%) and magazine restrictions (57% to 41%).
All three are measures supported by Obama, who intensified his focus on gun violence in the wake of the December school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.
As the number show however, universal background checks stand the strongest chance of success. Alengthy report this month by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Moriah Balingit detailed one example why: John Shick, the man who shot several people at the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic in Oakland in March 2012, had navigated haphazard background check laws to obtain his guns.
57% of respondents said Pa. gun control laws should be stricter, 35% said they should remain as-is, and 4% said they should be less strict. 60% favored stricted federal gun control laws (and 32% the same, 5% less strict).
Asked, “Who do you trust more to make the right decisions about gun laws, the Republicans in Congress or President Obama?” respondents chose Obama 47% to 38%.
“Pennsylvanians join voters in Virginia and New Jersey, states where Quinnipiac University has found overwhelming support for background checks for every gun purchase,” said Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. “Keystone State voters, especially voters in urban areas, seem to have had enough of gun violence. By large margins, voters don’t think assault weapons belong in the hands of any gun owner. Restrict the firepower of assault weapons or ban them entirely, Pennsylvanians say.”
The survey found 49 % of respondents believe gun ownership protects people from becoming victims of crime compared to 40% who said ownership puts people at risk. But that stops with semi-automatic assault rifles like that used in Newtown. 61% of respondents said those make the country more dangerous. Just 28% said they make the country safer.
The idea of having armed guards at schools would do more to reduce gun violence in schools than stricter 46% to 42%.
By a margin of 35% to 31%, respondents said they had an unfavorable impression of the National Rifle Association.
These numbers are the second release by Quinnipiac from the same survey, conducted from Jan. 22 to 27 using live interviewers calling landlines. The margin of error for the poll of 1,221 registered voters is plus or minus 2.8%. Pa. polls that use registration numbers rather than algorithms based on likely voters tend to favor Democrats by a few points and disadvantage Republicans compared to election results.
Yesterday’s releaseshowed Gov. Tom Corbett’s re-election numbers in trouble driven by a wide gender gap.
First Niagara Financial Group released its Fourth Annual Survey of Pennsylvania Business Leaders today and the results are not encouraging.
The survey was conducted by the Siena College Research Institute and the results were based on the responses of 715 Pennsylvania business leaders whose overall expectations for 2012 were not met and therefore are have lowered their expectations for the economy in 2013.
The business leaders sampled were from Pennsylvania’s major metropolitan areas of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Allentown, Scranton, Altoona, Harrisburg, Erie, Lancaster, Reading, and York. They represent CEOs, CFOs, and senior managers of private companies whose sales span $5 million to $200 million annually. The companies selected were from a variety of industries such as manufacturing, retail, engineering, and food and beverage.
Robert Kane, the Eastern Pennsylvania regional president for First Niagara shed some light on the real life ramifications of last year’s economic shortcomings.
“Many Pennsylvania business executives indicated their dissatisfaction with how the economy played out in 2012 for them versus their earlier expectations, so they have adopted a more critical outlook moving ahead in 2013… They are continuing to focus on growing their businesses but in a financially realistic way given the ‘new normal’ they have been dealing with.”
Pennsylvania’s unemployment rate was 7.9 percent as of December, a hair above the national average of 7.8 percent. It’s the second time since the recession began that Pa. is doing worse the the country at large (the Commonwealth was 0.4 percent above national in September 2012).
The results of this year’s survey show a marked difference in business leaders’ outlooks compared with last year. This year, 32 percent of those surveyed expect a change in economic conditions and 36 percent expect those conditions to stay the same as last year. In 2012, 42 percent of those surveyed had positive expectations for the year, expectations that were not fulfilled.
Western Pennsylvania regional president for First Niagara was cautiously optimistic despite the survey results saying, “Even as their confidence levels have dropped from last year, these business leaders are still primed to grow their businesses as the economy improves.”
You’d think with so many former legislators living here they could figure out a way to boost appropriations.
Here’s the latest on proposed Pa. prison closings. Local legislators oppose the move, but the Corbett administration says it will save the state money. Some say the haphazard announcement of the news is the real problem.
This is based on Tuesday, January 22 testimony at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in Harrisburg.
The Corbett administration had made plans earlier in the year to expedite the “closing prisons in Greensburg and Cresson within six months,” according to the Associated Press.
According to the Associated Press, “More than 51,000 inmates live in Pennsylvania prisons, jail or community correctional centers.” The new facilities would be used to keep up with the growing prison populations in Pennsylvania.
The discussion that was held during the Judiciary Committee meeting focused on the “800 employees” that would need to reshape their lives in light of the closings.
The critics of this plan included both Democrats and Republicans.
According to the Tribune-Democrat, State Senator Stewart Greenleaf (R-Montgomery) who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, attributes the lack of communication about the closings to “Pennsylvania’s [in]experience [with]closing prisons and that inexperience likely contributed to bungling by the Department of Corrections when it came to notifying the community and its own employees about the plan to shutter SCI-Cresson and SCI-Greensburg.”
The Corrections Secretary John Wetzel defended the decision to close the prison, but “apologized for the for the manner in which employees learned that they were being displaced.”
Senator Senator Randy Vulakovich (R-Allegheny) said, “These are major decisions in people’s lives. … I just don’t think we’ve given them the proper time to make a proper decision.”
Corrections Secretary John Wetzel believes after conducting detailed analysis that the prison population is expected to drop over the next three years. “Wetzel said, largely because of new laws that reserve prison beds for the most dangerous criminals and stress rehabilitation for non-violent offenders while diverting them to nonprison settings.”
Union officials claim that these calculations and estimations may be too ambitious. Gary Lightman, solicitor for the Pennsylvania State Corrections Officer Union, said “the state ought to consider adopting the model of community notification employed by the federal government in dealing with events such as the closing of military bases. In those cases, a public announcement of potential closings identifies multiple sites that could be shut. After public comment and studies, the list is winnowed until the final sites pegged for closing are announced.”
Green: HD42 as it will be for the special election. Pink: Its proposed new shape. Source: redistricting.pa.us
Allegheny County Republicans have chosen Dan Remely to run in a special election in May for state Senator Matt Smith’s now vacant House seat, HD-42. The seat became vacant after Smith was elected to serve as Senator for Pennsylvania’s 37th Senatorial District.
Dan Remely, 61 has been a member of the Mt. Lebanon school board since 2005. His name was one of a few rumoredto be favored by the GOP. He is also president of H-Squared Properties Inc. where he specializes in redeveloping and rehabilitating property.
The 42nd district is located entirely within Allegheny County and includes Mt. Lebanon and its surrounding communities. It favors Democrats by registration, but was held by Republicans until 2007.
Nominees for special election were chosen by the candidates’ respective parties rather than a primary race. Remely’s Democratic opponent will be attorney Dan Miller, an ally of Smith and former Mt. Lebanon commissioner, waschosen by the Democrats in mid-December.
Remely was chosen in the first ballot by Allegheny GOP committee members on Saturday. He defeated John Schnatterly, who immediately offered his support for Remely.
The special election will occur on May 21st in conjunction with the primary election as announced by House Speaker Sam Smith on January 17th. The special election will also fill the House seat of Auditor General Eugene DePasquale.
The winner of the HD-42 race will serve the remainder of Smith’s term through January, 2015.
Stephen Colbert highlighted Pa. Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi on Tuesday as part of a riff on GOP efforts to mitigate Democrats’ presidential advantage in a handful of blue states.
“Celebrating” Republican congressional gerrymandering, Colbert cited a Patriot News article about plans to allocate Pennsylvania’s electoral college votes by congressional district.
He quoted the Patriot News, “Pileggi argues that the winner-take-all system is inherently unfair because the losing party… gets no credit in the electoral count.”
It was not a perfect zinger. The plan Colbert criticized doesn’t actually have anything to do with congressional districts. Instead, Pileggi would allocate Pa.’s 20 electoral college votes according to vote percentage (plus 2 for the statewide winner). The Senator introduced a congressional-based plan in 2011 but has since backed away from it.
Pileggi (R-Delaware) pointed that out to Colbert on Twitter:
It looks like Republicans aren’t planning a full court press to pick up the seats of former state Reps. Eugene DePasquale and Matt Smith.
House Speaker Sam Smith announced today that the special elections for those seats will coincide with the municipal primary on May 21, rather than a separate scheduled day.
DePasquale was sworn in Tuesday as Pennsylvania’s Auditor General after serving three terms in his York-based district. Smith was sworn in Jan. 1 as a state Senator after three terms serving Mt. Lebanon in Allegheny County. Both are Democrats.
The path to victory for a Republican in either seat would have improved in a lower turnout special election because both districts offer Democrats a wide voter registration advantage.
The cost of a special state House race separate from the municipal primary would have been about $150,000 each based on estimates from previous elections.
Under constitutional guidelines, Smith could have scheduled a special election in HD-95 as early as March 19. Smith himself doesn’t have a history of picking special election dates that benefit his party, but it’s a fairly common practice in Harrisburg.
A few consultants who spoke with PoliticsPA agreed that it would cost the GOP around $250,000 to stand a serious chance of flipping each seat even in a March special. And while DePasquale’s York district would remain about the same under the currently proposed redistricting plan, Matt Smith’s would become significantly more Democratic.
The politicos agreed that the GOP’s money will be better spent protecting the party’s 111 to 92 state House majority in 2014.
All that said, municipal primaries are only relatively higher turnout affairs than special state house elections, so it’s not a done deal for the Dems. The caliber of the candidates and their campaigns (and in the Republicans’ case, their ability to support themselves financially) will determine how competitive the races are.
The official candidate selection process can begin now that the election dates have been set. But 3 of the four candidates, for practical purposes, are already chosen.
In HD-95 in York, Democrats are likely to nominate Kevin Schreiber, 32, who works for the York Redevelopment Authority. Republicans are poised to pick Bryan Tate, 45, the Vice President of Philanthropy at the York County Community Foundation.
In HD-42 in Allegheny County, Democrats are likely to nominate Dan Miller, 39, an attorney and former member of the Mt. Lebanon Board of Commissioners (and a Smith ally). Republicans don’t have their nominee yet. The two names we’re hearing are Mt. Lebanon School Board member Dan Remely and businessman John Schnatterly.
In any case, it will be a good trial run for Rep. Tim Briggs (D-Montco), the newly minted chair of the House Democratic Campaign Committee.
Republicans face an uphill challenge in their effort to flip the state House seat of Pa.’s new Auditor General Eugene DePasquale. But they’ve chosen the man who will give it a shot.
Bryan Tate, 45, is the Vice President of Philanthropy at the York County Community Foundation and former campaign and legislative staffer.
He lives in the city of York and was the only candidate to pursue his party’s nomination, according to York GOP Chair Bob Wilson.
Prior to joining YCCF, Tate worked as Chief of Staff to Todd Platts in the state House and the U.S. House, as well as his campaign manager for his first congressional run in 2000.
“I fully suspect with Mr. Tate’s experience as an active partner in the development and promotion of York and all of its assets as well as being the former Chief of Staff to former Congressman Todd Platts, that he will obtain the unanimous support of the Republican Committee members who represent the 95th State House District and will become our nominee to be placed on the ballot for the upcoming Special Election,” Wilson said.
York GOP committee members who reside in the 95th district will vote to select a nominee, whose name will be forwarded to the state GOP for approval.
The County party is hosting a forum with Tate on Jan. 24 at the Crispus Attucks Center.
In all likelihood he’ll end up facing Democrat Kevin Schreiber, 32. Like Tate, Schreiber was the only candidate to pursue his party’s process for seeking the nomination.
Only one part of HD-95, the northern portion in green, would leave the district under the latest reapportionment plan.
The 95th district has been in Democratic hands for nearly three decades; the party enjoys a 29 point edge in voter registration (57 percent to 28 percent). Additionally, it’s one of the least-altered districts under the proposed redistricting plan. That said, Republicans tend to perform better in low turnout special elections.
House Speaker Sam Smith has 10 days to call a special election – most anticipate a date in May* – to replace DePasquale. After 3 terms, the Democrat won election to the office of Auditor General.
*The original version of this story said March. It will probably be May 21, the same as the primary election.
McCord says the oath of office to Supreme Court Justice Debra Todd as his wife and sons look on. Photo: Dept. of Treasury
Pa. Treasurer Rob McCord completed the trio of statewide Democrats who took the oath of office today. In his case, it’s the second time.
“As I look ahead to my second term, my team and I will continue to find new, innovative ways to save and make money for the people of Pennsylvania,” McCord said. “We’ve made Treasury a place where innovation and thinking outside the box thrives. That’s what it will take to solve the problems we face today.”
The prospective 2014 gubernatorial candidate challenged the anti-government message of Gov. Tom Corbett and Republicans.
He drew loud and fervent applause as he said government can be “magnificent” in its achievements and more when he outlined an alternative to the “pinched pessimism” he implied was the message of Gov. Tom Corbett, especially when it came to investing in education, transportation and other priorities.
He also criticized voter ID measures in the context of his diverse family, saying, “We need to stop people – even if it polls well – from repealing voting rights. That is a wrong, we need to stand and fight. And we will.”
DePasquale takes the oath of office as his family looks on
Harrisburg — Eugene DePasquale promised to put his reform agenda into action as he was sworn in as Pennsylvania’s new Auditor General.
The three-term York state lawmaker took his oath as his family and politicos from around Pa. and both parties looked on.
He said his role was not just to expose the problems of government, but to propose solutions as well.
“Part of this job is using this as a bully pulpit to outline what is happening and to express to the people of Pennsylvania what needs to be changed,” he said. “The Auditor General is a very interesting role. You have enormous power in the sense you can go in and conduct the audits, but you don’t have the power to go in and make the change.”
“I am going to use my understanding of the General Assembly and what it takes to get laws done, and also working with the Corbett administration, to make the change that is needed.”
He talked about education and infrastructure, but his highest notes came on the subject of the environment. He emphasized his commitment to balancing economic growth with safety vis-a-vis development of Marcellus shale.
“That is why one of my first official duties as Auditor General will be to initiate a performance audit of the Department of Environmental Protection to make sure our constitutional right to pure water is not being compromised,” he said.
As York County Controller Robb Green pointed out, DePasquale is the first York countian to win statewide office since Gov. George Leader in 1954.
And as newly elected state Sen. Rob Teplitz noted, “he’s the first Pa. Auditor General to have mastered P90X.”
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