Spending by Pa. judges should be open to scrutiny

We should be accustomed by now, we guess, to elected officials eating on our dime without carefully accounting for their spending.

After all, members of the state General Assembly are permitted to take per diems — daily allowances for food and lodging — of up to $183 without needing to submit receipts.

But we continue to be appalled by the lack of transparency that permeates the culture of elected officials in Pennsylvania.

The Caucus investigation reminds us that this culture extends to appellate judges, who apparently not only are comfortable with it but expect to live comfortably within it.

Here is what Senior Judge Jim Colins told that publication about his expenditures of taxpayer money on meals and a leased car.

“My services are damn cheap for the taxpayer for the amount of work that I produce and the degree of responsibility,” Colins said. “I don’t eat at McDonald’s anymore, nor do I think I should.”

“I’m big,” he said. “I weigh 225 pounds. I’m over 6 foot. I don’t fit into compact cars, and, quite frankly, it takes a lot of food to fill me up.”

Well, quite frankly, his comments showed an alarming disrespect for taxpayers and an even more alarming lack of judgment for someone with “judge” in his job title.

His quotes conveyed a dismaying sense of entitlement — to drive a large car, to eat large meals — and seemed to dismiss our need as taxpayers to know the details of his spending. He said he does not charge the state more than $35 per meal, but he seldom submits itemized receipts (so clearly we need to take his word on that).

Colins said his life has been threatened several times, and that is clearly terrible. He’s also received letters overtly threatening his physical safety, and that’s terrible, too.

“From those (expense) reports, you can find out where I’m staying or where I will probably eat if I’m in Harrisburg or Pittsburgh,” Colins told The Caucus. “I don’t want anyone to be able to follow me and surprise me . ... Judges are prime targets.”

But many of the receipts obtained by The Caucus showed one-time visits to restaurants, so there was no pattern for a would-be attacker to discern, even if that person went to the trouble of seeking out the same records The Caucus obtained.

And really, where is the danger in disclosing judges’ dining partners?

We’re allowed to know that they ate scallops, pear pizzas, Piedmontese tenderloin and, in one case, a $13 alligator appetizer, but state records hide who they dined with, and where.

If we’re paying for judges’ meals, shouldn’t we at least be allowed to know who else is at the table, talking to them?

We have great respect for the judiciary, and believe that the safety of judges is vital. But cloaking the details of their spending for “security” reasons seems ridiculous to us.

Compare this state of affairs to Florida, which is described by The Caucus as “the gold standard for open records, with almost all government documents made available to the public.”

Craig Waters, a spokesman for that state’s Supreme Court, actually laughed — he laughed — when told about Pennsylvania’s redaction of restaurant names.

Florida redacts only sensitive personal information such as a judge’s Social Security number, Waters said.

Using security as a reason to redact information is “so obviously baloney,” Steve Davis, the former chair of Syracuse University’s journalism department and a former newspaper editor, told The Caucus. We completely agree. Robert Strauss, a professor of economics and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, told The Caucus that judges are underpaid compared to attorneys at large, private law firms. He believes judges “probably deserve special treatment.”

We concede his first point (though with annual salaries of $195,978, Commonwealth Court judges aren’t exactly making chump change). But we adamantly disagree with his second point.

Judges deserve our respect for their essential governmental role upholding justice.

But no elected official who’s spending taxpayer money should be able to keep secret the details of that spending.

And because these particular officials are public servants of sound judgment, they should grasp why taxpayers deserve greater transparency.

— LNP, The Associated Press