“Inmates will get paid based on a decision by the Rendell administration.”

Pennsylvania’s payroll rules on budget impasse defy common sense

By Brad Bumsted and Debra Erdley
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Tuesday, July 7, 2009

It doesn’t make an ounce of sense to John Srsic that state lottery workers will get their paychecks but state troopers and corrections officers won’t be paid if leaders in Harrisburg can’t agree on a budget soon.“To select a group who are not law enforcement to pay, I can’t understand. We can live without those in the lottery. What’s more important to the public?” said Srsic, 72, of Pleasant Hills, a retired state Department of Labor and Industry manager.

Elected officials and average citizens questioned the state’s priorities in the budget impasse, which enters its seventh day today. Gov. Ed Rendell, pushing a 16 percent state income tax increase, and Senate Republicans, advocating severe spending cuts, remain miles apart on closing a $3.25 billion deficit.

The majority of the state’s 77,000 employees won’t get paid starting in late July and early August, but inmates will continue to get paid for working at state prisons and for so-called “idle time” sitting in their cells. About 31,000 inmates participate in work programs that pay them 19 to 42 cents per hour, and about 7,000 inmates get paid 72 cents a day for good behavior in anticipation of a prison job.

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There is no single reason why some get paid and others do not. It’s a combination of various parameters, including court rulings, state law, administrative decisions and public safety concerns.

Welfare recipients must be paid based on state court decisions upholding federal law. But until a budget is passed, state welfare workers can’t be paid for work done since July 1 because Pennsylvania has no authority to spend money.

“You’re paying people that aren’t working, and people that are working aren’t getting paid,” said Carla Powell, 49, of Lawrenceville, a security guard at Gateway Center. “That’s ridiculous. That’s really asinine.”

Agencies considered “independent” such as the Turnpike Commission, the Liquor Control Board and the Fish and Boat Commission continue to pay workers because they generate their own revenue separate from the state’s general fund.

If the budget impasse continues, checks for workers paid out of the general fund will be reduced and eventually eliminated . The difference essentially is the pot of money they are paid from, and that is set in law, said Chuck Ardo, the governor’s spokesman.

Inmates will get paid based on a decision by the Rendell administration. Ardo said it’s a “strongly held view … that safety of corrections officers would be compromised” if inmates can’t buy smokes and snacks at the commissary. “Keeping the prisons safe has got to be a priority,” Ardo said.

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State police would be affected like most other state workers, spokeswoman Cpl. Linette Quinn said, even though state police are partially funded from the Motor Vehicle Fund. Troopers would not be paid Aug. 7.

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