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Fixing Pennsylvania’s broken budget process

by Chris Doherty

Now that the dust from the contentious budget debate has settled, I’ve reviewed what was passed and found that, after more than 100 days of delay due to partisan fighting, Harrisburg gave us a budget that makes significant cuts to crucial programs that Pennsylvania families count on, especially in an economy where so many people are hurting.

From cuts to economic development programs, to cuts in social services and cuts in library funding, the current budget makes things harder on Pennsylvania families.

Despite that, my biggest problem with the budget is not with any one line item—it is with the way in which the state legislators in Harrisburg fundamentally think about the budget.

Every year lawmakers struggle to craft a budget that just barely gets us through the coming year and then they pat themselves on the back and put the whole mess behind them… until about 10 months later when they start the whole ridiculous process over again.

If you’ve ever seen the movie “Groundhog Day,” you have some idea of what the budget process is like.

The fact is, the Pennsylvania budget process itself is broken, and I don’t just mean the partisan bickering. Shortsightedness is the problem with our budget and until we change that, Pennsylvania families are going to pay the price.

The current budget process provides no long-term vision and takes a year-by-year approach that allows the same problems to fester in perpetuity, and that will never work. It will only provide enough cover to get you to the next budget, nothing more. It will never get Pennsylvania working again.

If we want a budget that works for Scranton families and families in every other city in the commonwealth, we need a budget process that has its sights set on the future. We need a budget that plans for the long term, grows our economy, and leads the country, not lags behind it.

We need a budget that has the future in mind is a budget that will create jobs, increase investment in Pennsylvania communities, and make our state the best in the country in which to raise a family.

I’m not saying that would be an easy budget to produce. It would require sacrificing smaller, immediate benefits for larger, longer-term benefits. Most politicians like their immediate benefits and are reluctant to give them up, even if they’re smaller by comparison. In that light their preference for a shortsighted budget is understandable, but it’s not acceptable.

Here in Scranton, we’ve made the tough choices and adopted a longer-term view and it’s paying dividends. Take, for example, the block grants provided to us by the federal government.

It used to be that we just gave those grants away here and there. It provided a short-term boost in some areas, but it seldom seemed to generate much in the way of long-term success.

So we decided to try a different approach. Rather than give that money away, we took two-thirds of it and used it to provide loans to local businesses that wanted to expand and outside businesses that wanted to invest in Scranton. And when we were done lending that money out, we sold the loans to a firm that was willing to give us 92 cents on the dollar and we took that money and loaned it out again. The results were amazing.

By refusing to settle for the immediate, smaller, short-term gains, we were able to turn those block grants into $10 million worth of loans that have created a sense of excitement in our city and sent a message that Scranton is open for business.

That’s just one of the examples of forward-looking budgeting that has worked here in Scranton.

Since we started budgeting with an eye towards the future, we’ve created thousands of new jobs, brought in $500 million in new investment, and succeeded in making Scranton a better city for families. In fact, Business Week magazine even listed Scranton as one of the best cities in the state for raising a family.

If we’re going to get Pennsylvania back on track, this is the lesson we need to learn. Otherwise, like Bill Murray, Pennsylvanians are going to suffer through a budgetary version of Groundhog Day year after year.

The writer, the mayor of Scranton, is a Democratic candidate for governor.

October 29, 2009 at 7:00 am

--Chris Doherty

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