Feb 6, 2007 By Alison Hawkes For The 2 min read

HARRISBURG – Getting a full list of House employee salaries requires more than 100 formal record requests and more than three months, maybe longer, to obtain. But the archaic system is beginning to crack under the weight of news reports over the weekend that pointed out how difficult it is to verify how salaries compared to the House’s $3.2 million in employee bonuses over the last two years. House Republican Leader Sam Smith announced early Monday that a list of Republican staff and their salaries would be made available that day. House Speaker Dennis O’Brien said from now on salaries would be published annually with the updated list of House employees. The 2007 list is expected to come out the end of next week. “It’s a new session. It’s a new day in Harrisburg,” said O’Brien’s spokesman Bill Patton. “The new Speaker is trying to make the House a more open and transparent institution.”

Though far better, reform activist Gene Stilp said there are holes in the new system as well. Employee bonus information is still kept secret. Salaries are not on the Internet, making it necessary to travel to Harrisburg to pick up documents.

And the public needs to know past salaries to see if employee bonuses line up with election years, he said.

For example, House Democrats handed out more than three times the amount of employee bonuses in 2006 than in 2005. The two-year total was $2.3 million.

“It’s very important to get past payroll records so you can see the pattern of how employees were paid bonuses,” Stilp said.

Up until now, getting payroll records was a matter of submitting names, with a limit of 15 at a time, to the House Clerk’s office and then making an appointment to view the records in Harrisburg. The procedure was doable for small requests, but cumbersome for larger requests whereby a full list of salaries for the House’s more than 1,600 employees would take at least 106 record requests. The Senate provides a full list of salaries, although its bonus information has not available.

When the controversy over legislative employee bonuses broke last week, there was no immediate salary information from the House. A spokesman for House Democratic Leader Bill DeWeese said he would not be independently releasing employee salaries.

Alison Hawkes can be reached at 717-705-6330 or ahawkes@calkins-media.com