Pennsylvania’s budget debacle is the gift that keeps on giving — trouble, that is.
Although Gov. Tom Wolf acquiesced and signed a $30 billion version last week, nine months after the deadline, he vetoed the fiscal code. That’s a separate piece of legislation that routinely accompanies a budget and spells out the details and formulas that must be used in sending the taxpayers’ money to school districts, human service agencies and other operations.
But not in this budget round, when nothing has been normal and everything has become a skirmish in the open warfare between the Republican-led Legislature and the Democratic administration. Both sides are complicit.
The governor is correct that legislators put some features in the fiscal code that went beyond what should have been included. It contains provisions that put the brakes on natural gas regulations that have long been in the works, gives the Legislature too much authority over a Clean Power Plan prepared by the state Department of Environmental Protection and plays some tricks with funding for early childhood education and school construction.
The two sides will have to work out their differences at some point. In the meantime, though, the governor is ready to overstep his own authority in order to distribute basic education funding.
In his veto statement, Mr. Wolf called the method included in the fiscal code “one of the most inequitable funding distribution formulas in the nation.” Maybe so, but we don’t think that means the governor should be able to hand out the funds in any way he pleases. Yet he intends to do just that. His office is in the process of developing a formula, one that it says will be “the most appropriate possible.”
That’s not how this is supposed to work. If there is no formula that has the force of law, shouldn’t the governor be relying on a formula that had been in effect before this year’s budget battle?
The governor’s veto and his stated intention to proceed in whatever way he pleases is bound to trigger a legal challenge. Given the intransigence all around, maybe a court fight is the only logical extension of this war.
First Published: April 1, 2016, 4:00 a.m.
