Once the next governor takes over the financial mess in which Pennsylvania finds itself, it’s going to be a long, hard journey back to balanced budgets, Attorney General Tom Corbett said Thursday.
“We’re going to suffer the next two years,” Corbett said in an interview with Tribune-Review editors and reporters. He blames the looming crisis — a combination of multibillion-dollar deficits, the loss of federal stimulus money and a pending explosion in pension costs — on both parties’ “sins of the past.” Corbett is running against state Rep. Sam Rohrer of Berks County in the May 18 Republican primary.
Corbett said he would not violate his pledge not to raise taxes, so on his watch the state would have to cut its way out of a projected $3 billion to $5 billion deficit, even if the reductions prove so unpopular, he’s voted out after one term.
“We’re going to do what’s necessary. If we don’t get re-elected, I don’t care,” Corbett said. “I’m at a beautiful stage in my life. If I get elected to governor and don’t get re-elected, I can go do something else. This wasn’t my ambition of my whole life, like I think (with) some people it tends to be.”
Corbett was among six gubernatorial candidates — all four Democrats and independent Robert Allen Mansfield — campaigning in Pittsburgh yesterday.
Before delivering a lecture to Carnegie Mellon University graduate students, the attorney general visited the Norfolk Southern railroad terminal in Marshall Shadeland to outline a transportation plan that includes figuring out how the state can pay to maintain its thousands of miles of roads, and relying on public-private partnerships to complete projects such as the Mon-Fayette Expressway.
“We need to create an honest, real plan” for transportation funding,” Corbett said, because the federal government denied the state’s petition to toll Interstate 80, creating a $472 million hole in Pennsylvania’s transportation budget.
Corbett, 60, would create a transportation funding group to determine how the state can pay for its transportation needs without raising taxes. He said he had no estimate for how much his transportation priorities would cost, but money could be raised by selling state resources such as liquor stores and putting the funds into a trust fund.
Rohrer panned the plan for its lack of specifics.
