The exterior of the Pennsylvania state Capitol. (Photo by Amanda Mustard for the Pennsylvania Capital-Star).
In one of its final votes of the 2023-2024 legislative session, the Pennsylvania House sent a bill to Gov. Josh Shapiro for his signature that would tear down a longstanding barrier to first responders receiving workers compensation for post-traumatic stress injuries.
Championed by a Republican senator and a Democratic representative, the legislation is one of 241 measures to pass in both chambers of the divided General Assembly this session. So far, Shapiro has signed 231 into law.
State Rep. Jennifer O’Mara (D-Delaware) said on the House floor Wednesday that the bipartisan vote would cap six years of work devoted to the memory of her father, a Philadelphia firefighter who died by suicide. Senate Bill 365, which was introduced by Sen. Camera Bartolotta (R-Washington), mirrors O’Mara’s bill that passed in the House in May.
The workers compensation bill is an example of a successful bipartisan effort between the House and Senate, but the two chambers agreed on the fewest bills this session since the 2009-2010 session. When the Legislature was last divided, with Republicans controlling the Senate and Democrats holding a majority in the House, it sent only 238 bills to the governor’s desk.
Although the House is scheduled to return to session for two days after the Nov. 5 election, the Senate has no scheduled return before the year’s end, so any legislation not passed on Wednesday is likely to die.
Several big ticket legislative priorities from this session including new funding for mass transit and transportation infrastructure, protections for consumers facing utility cutoffs, and a chance for childhood sexual abuse survivors to seek justice will languish until the next General Assembly revisits them, or not, in 2025.
Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman (R-Indiana) said in a statement that the productivity of a legislative session is not measured simply in the volume of new laws enacted. The quality of new laws is equally important, Pittman said, as is the work of Senate Republicans to prevent government overreach and new spending.
“We remain focused on growing Pennsylvania opportunities for families and not growing Pennsylvania government,” noting that Senate Republicans have demonstrated responsible fiscal leadership through investments in the commonwealth’s rainy day fund. “The reality is that there are limitations of having a divided government, especially given our deep philosophical differences.”
A spokesperson for House Majority Leader Matt Bradford (D-Montgomery) did not respond to a request for comment.
Shapiro’s budget proposal for 2024-2025 included $283 million in new funding for transit agencies across the state including the state’s largest, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA), which warned of fare hikes and service cuts as pandemic era federal aid dries up.
Shapiro’s proposal would have boosted the amount of state sales tax directed to the Transportation Trust Fund from 4.4% to 6.4%, and although the House passed three versions of a bill to enact the increase, Republicans in both chambers steadfastly opposed it.
Senate Republicans said they wouldn’t support a transit funding increase without a concomitant increase in funding for improvements to roads, bridges and regional airports. Several proposals called for regulation and taxation of skill games – the slot machine look-alikes that have popped up in convenience stores, bars and restaurants across the state.
Among the proposals was Sen. Frank Farry’s (R-Bucks) bill that would have generated an estimated $500 million in new transportation funding by restricting skill games to establishments with liquor licenses and giving the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board authority to regulate them.
As the impasse dragged on into the fall, Farry told the Capital-Star recently that he felt like the student in the back of the classroom with the right answer waiting to be called on. And House Transportation Committee Chairperson Ed Neilson said he was open to new funding sources for transit and multimodal transportation, but received nothing concrete from the Senate.
“We can listen and hear rumors of this and that but we aren’t rumor people. We are action people,” Neilson told the Capital-Star.
No consensus on lifeline for families struggling to pay bills
A lifeline for families struggling to pay utility bills is scheduled to expire at the end of this year and Pennsylvania lawmakers agreed on the need to renew it, but were unable to reach a consensus on the details.
The House and Senate each passed bills to reauthorize the 20-year-old law known as Chapter 14 of the Public Utilities Code. The law provides a framework in which utilities must work with customers who are unable to pay their bills and puts limits on when and how utilities can be shut off.
The House version of the bill would have made more consumers eligible for payment plans on overdue bills, eliminated reconnection fees and security deposits for some customers and allowed the Public Utilities Commission to take notice of protection from abuse orders from other states to give domestic violence victims more leeway.
The Senate bill would have required those who avoided paying bills in bad faith to pay security deposits and forgiven reconnection fees for those enrolled in a payment plan.
Although the bills passed in their respective chambers with bipartisan support, they never progressed beyond the opposite chambers’ consumer protection committees.
Legislation to allow abuse survivors to sue also fails
The General Assembly began the two-year session in January 2023 determined to make progress toward opening a two-year window for adults who were sexually abused as children to seek justice.
The suspension of the state’s time limit to file civil lawsuits for sexual abuse has been a goal for well over a decade, since the extent of a systematic cover up by the Catholic church was revealed in the early 2000s. A joint resolution to amend the Pennsylvania Constitution to allow abuse survivors to sue brought the state as close as it has ever come to providing relief but a technical error by the Department of State scuttled the effort in 2021.
Reps. Mark Rozzi (D-Berks) and Jim Gregory (R-Blair), both survivors of sexual abuse as children, championed the effort anew in 2023. Although the survivors amendment had support in both chambers, the Senate linked it with proposals to require voter identification and expand legislative authority over executive branch regulations.
The three-part constitutional amendment package passed the Senate with nearly unanimous Democratic opposition. The House passed a gutted version of the Senate bill containing only the abuse survivors amendment in May 2023. Progress on the survivors amendment ended there.
Rozzi is retiring this year to focus on his mental health. Gregory lost his May primary. And survivors of childhood sexual abuse in Pennsylvania will continue to wait for their day in court.