2 staffers still on payroll after 2021 commission disbanded

More than two years have passed since Pennsylvania Legislative Reapportionment Commission approved new maps defining House and Senate district boundaries.

Eighteen months have gone by since the U.S. Supreme Court put the punctuation mark on the redistricting maps by declining to hear House Republicans’ petition challenging the validity of the maps.

The state is in the throes of its second election cycle that has candidates running for House and Senate districts drawn by the five-member reapportionment commission.

Despite all that transpired since the commission last met in February 2022, two employees remain on its payroll and are collecting a combined $184,000 in salary.

Commission Chairman Mark Nordenberg, who refused payment for his work on the commission, said the employees are compiling a report from the 2021 reapportionment as well as scanning, digitizing and organizing 75 to 80 cardboard boxes of rudimentarily organized records from the state’s five previous reapportionment commissions that date to 1971.

“We’ve taken on some extra work, but I think it’s very consistent with what we have been trying to do and also very consistent with what are the needs I think of people to know that they can get access to these really important democratic processes,” said Nordenberg.

‘Deserve to know’

One commission member questions why it is taking so long.

“It’s 2024,” said Rep. Kerry Benninghoff, R-Centre County, who was the House GOP representative on the commission. “It would be different if we were talking two or three months after the commission completed its work.”

Further, he believes the two employees could have been paid on a per diem basis and cast doubt that it required year-round full-time work by two employees — Ann-Marie Sweeney collecting a $124,200-a-year salary and Cheri Mizdail, $59,800 a year — to complete. The two employees are paid out of the Legislative Data Processing Center budget but its executive director Brent McClintock said Nordenberg supervises them.

House GOP spokesman Jason Gottesman questioned how a non-elected individual who works outside of state government “is able to control hundreds of thousands of state taxpayer money and two employees whose work product has not been made public.”

Just as troubling, he said, is the mystery around who authorized the additional work of organizing the past commissions’ records. “Taxpayers deserve to know,” Gottesman said.

Senate President Pro Tempore Kim Ward, R-Westmoreland County, who served on the commission, said through her spokeswoman Erica Clayton Wright that “any supervision or assignments are made to staff at the direction of Mr. Nordenberg.”

A spokeswoman for another commission member, House Speaker Joanna McClinton, D-Philadelphia, pointed to the resolutions that created the commission as granting the authority.

Senate Democratic Leader Jay Costa of Allegheny County, the fifth member of the commission, said he believed the resolutions creating the commission granted Nordenberg the authority and he is pleased Nordenberg took the initiative to do it.

“It’s something long overdue,” Costa said. “It’s going to position us well for future redistricting commissions.”

He said the 2021 commission had difficulty finding past reapportionment commissions’ records to help guide its work and relied on a book written by now-Duquesne University President Ken Gormley who chaired the 1991 reapportionment commission.

“That was all we had,” Costa said. “It would have been very valuable to have access to some of this information at our disposal in a manner where we would be able to look at it online as opposed to having some document in some warehouse somewhere where they archived some of these documents.”

Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman, R-Indiana County, said he was aware this archiving work was underway. but added, “In my opinion, that (work) needs to wrap up.”

Nordenberg said the timeline for completion of the commission’s work is in line with that of previous commissions. He said the 1991 commission issued their report in August 1994.

The 2001 commission didn’t issue a report. The 2011 report was undated but refers to a case decided in March 2014 so it would have been after that.