Deadline near but deal is not on Pa. budget
HARRISBURG, Pa. — Negotiators in Pennsylvania’s nine-day-old budget stalemate signaled that they were having difficulty reaching agreement Sunday on a deal to scrounge more than $2 billion to patch up the state government’s tattered finances.
Closed-door talks in Pennsylvania’s Capitol came a day before Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf ’s midnight Monday deadline to make a decision on the main appropriations bill in a $32 billion budget package.
With the Legislature led by anti-tax Republican majorities, those discussions have centered on another big expansion of gambling in the nation’s No. 2 commercial casino state and borrowing roughly $1.5 billion against future revenues from Pennsylvania’s share of a landmark 1998 multistate settlement with tobacco companies.
Friction on Sunday revolved around Wolf ’s insistence that lawmakers produce $700 million to $800 million in reliable revenue, such as tax increases, to help the state avoid another downgrade to its battered credit rating.
House Majority Leader Dave Reed, R-indiana, told rank-and-file Republicans that an agreement was close Sunday afternoon. But he also suggested to reporters that Wolf should start thinking about which parts of the spending bill to veto because Republicans were not willing to meet his demands.
“The administration has consistently said they need more revenue than some of the options that we provided and we, basically, at least from a House perspective, reached the extent of what we’re willing to offer,” Reed told reporters Sunday afternoon.
Negotiators have said little publicly about their private discussions, particularly about what sort of tax increases were under discussion.
Wolf has steadfastly pushed a tax package he frames as making corporations pay their “fair share,” including slapping a production tax on drilling in the Marcellus Shale, the natural gas reservoir that made Pennsylvania the nation’s No. 2 natural gas state.
Senate Republican leaders have acknowledged that some sort of tax increase will likely be part of a final package, but have not said exactly what they were considering, or how much.