By Dick Miller
WE.CONNECT.DOTS: –Harrisburg, PA — For two weeks of every January the dung tossed around in this town comes from farm animals rather than politicians.
Since January 9 and ending this past Saturday. that has been the scenario in the centennial version of the Pennsylvania Farm Show, the largest indoor agricultural event in America. Some 21 acres under roof, no admission fee, little else matters this time of the year in Harrisburg.
Politicians and farm animals never are in competition as the town is given over to agricultural achievements during these two weeks. Of course, taxpayers waiting for a current fiscal year (2015-16, started last July 1) budget represent the first time this major government event competed with Farm Show news.
We are in the seventh month – over 200 days – past when our leaders were supposed to decide how to spend over $30 billion for public purposes during this fiscal year.
For no more reason, dung should be flying farther east and across the river in the large domed edifice surrounded by other buildings of a state government complex.
Missing is a debate that is the mechanism to fix disagreements over what funds should be extracted from our pockets and which purposes should these dollars serve.
But this is not the real world, this is Harrisburg, location of the most disingenuous state government on the planet. The situation gets more complex by governmental overlap. On Feb. 9, freshman Gov. Tom Wolf will present his second annual (2016-17) fiscal year spending plan.
Governor Wolf and the Republican legislature are almost certain to have not settled differences on his first spending plan.
Even in normal times, annual spending plans are a joke, relying exclusively on political climate for making decisions. The thousands of hours of numbers-crunching and innovation inspiring get little attention. Almost always, major budget changes are directed from above, not submitted from below.
Budget developing begins with submissions of work-ups by managers of field and street offices. These numbers, for the next fiscal year, are usually due in October of the preceding year, most often before supervisors are aware of what their fiscal boundaries are for the current year.
The spending plan begins moving up the department line, adding requests from regional and district offices to bureau chiefs. Finally, budget proposals are summarized for each department and submitted to the Governor’s Budget Secretary for first presentation to the legislature in early February.
We are mere weeks before campaign time. Current members (or challengers) of America’s largest, full-time, well paid legislature tell potential voters they intend to promote even more services for less coin extracted. If public confidence in the state legislature remains low, incumbents will explain in tedious detail how it is everyone else’s fault.
Bottom Line: For now, our lawmakers are sheep in flocks, just like their counterparts up the street and across the river, waiting to be dragged out and shown for a ribbon. They are not at the table where important decisions on the 2015-16 operating budget are made. Our sheep will be told “how it is” literally minutes before they are expected to vote on “what it is” . . . “whenever it is.”
Unless the judging is also rigged at the Pennsylvania Farm Show, you may want to skip the state capital and wait for next year’s 101st Farm Show
