Nov 24, 2004 By Rick Martinez For The 5 min read

HARRISBURG – Lawmakers did not get their pay raise and the governor is to blame – or to thank, depending on how you look at it. Another theory is that it was the Senate Republicans who sank the bump in salary.

Or maybe the real reason lawmakers will be getting only a 5.2 percent cost-of-living increase in pay next Wednesday – instead of 20 percent – is because support in the House for a raise was so evenly divided that no representative wanted to be that last vote putting it over the top.

Those were just some of the reasons being bandied about the Capitol and in lawmakers’ district offices Tuesday, two days after the lame duck session ended without legislators having voted on the touchy subject of giving themselves more money.

In fact, after three months of speculation about a pay increase, lawmakers produced no bill or amendment detailing the specifics of a raise. Many claim they still don’t know how much extra they stood to make.

“We never knew the plan. We never had anything given to us,” said state Rep. Dave Steil (R-Bucks).

Like other representatives, Steil said he learned through the newspapers that the proposal was to peg lawmakers’ salaries to 50 or 55 percent of congressmen. That would have raised representatives’ and senators’ salaries from their current $66,204 to just more than $79,000.

Salary hikes for the state’s judges and the governor’s Cabinet officers likewise would have been indexed to similar federal positions.

Steil said that in the waning days of the session late last week, he heard that anywhere from 97 to 103 House members supported the pay hike. And in the 203-member House, that just isn’t enough of a comfort zone, he said.

“Nobody wants to be the 103rd vote, so you need 110 or 111,” Steil said.

Steil and other House members said they heard the real stumbling block was among Senate Republicans. But Sen. Joe Conti (R-Bucks) said that while members of his caucus had reservations about a raise, there was enough support.

“The only discussion we had on it was Friday, and there was a feeling among some that it was a bit too generous,” he said. “But then we never talked about it again.”

Conti said if there was a lack of support in the Senate, it was probably on the Democratic side. As proof, he cites a last-minute effort by Sen. Vince Fumo (D-Philadelphia) to pass a motion to give the state’s judges – and only judges – a raise.

It is difficult in Harrisburg during a lame duck session to gauge support for something as sensitive as a pay raise. Usually in these cases, each of the four caucuses – Senate and House Republicans, Senate and House Democrats – is supposed to round up enough votes to approve a hike.

But because there can be a political price to pay for voting oneself a raise, senators who face an election in two years or representatives who face a tough campaign are given the OK by their leaders not to vote for the raise, even though they may think they deserve a bump.

The biggest question in the behind-the-scenes position for a raise was Gov. Ed Rendell. At first, the governor said publicly that he would be hard pressed to deny lawmakers a raise if they voted themselves one. Later, the governor would say he would need some “hard persuading” to agree to a hike.

The talk in the Capitol was that Rendell was positioning himself to use the raise as a bargaining chip for getting lawmakers to pass his Growing Greener II and mass transit proposals.

The Legislature did not pass those two priorities of Rendell’s. Then moments before the gavel came down on the session, Rendell told reporters he wouldn’t sign a pay raise for lawmakers because they hadn’t made their case.

At a press conference Tuesday, the governor was even more specific.

“I’m the reason we didn’t have a pay raise,” he said.

State Rep. Frank LaGrotta (D-Beaver) said he thought it was this failure by Republicans to give the governor what he wanted that doomed the raise.

“The governor laid out some specific issues be wanted addressed, and the Senate Republicans were unwilling to address them,” he said.

LaGrotta said he does think most of his House colleagues would have voted for a raise had they been given the chance.

Lawmakers next month will get a bigger paycheck, thanks to former Gov. Tom Ridge. In 1996, Ridge agreed to the Legislature’s plan to give itself automatic cost-of-living increases every year.

House Comptroller Alexis Brown said Tuesday that those raises are tied to the Consumer Price Index for Philadelphia, which has the highest cost of living in the state.

Last Dec. 1, that meant lawmakers got a 2.4 percent bump in pay. This Dec. 1, they’ll receive a 5.2 percent hike.

“That number comes out of the [U.S.] Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics,” said Brown. “It’s based on the entire year and can either go up or down.”

Rick Martinez can be reached at 717-705-6330 or rmartinez@calkins-media.com.