Feb 27, 2007 3 min read

Despite proclamations that he’s all for reform, clues continue trickling out to fuel the fire of skepticism concerning state House Majority Leader H. William DeWeese. The latest: A revelation that despite prior poor-mouthing by the Waynesburg Democrat – who said lavish bonuses to Democrat staffers was needed to offset the higher regular pay scale of House Republicans – the Democrats’ 2006 payroll was actually higher than the GOP’s. Lots higher, as in $3.48 million, even though the two caucuses had roughly the same number of employees. Here’s how it really stacked up: Democrats paid $34,453,541 to 835 staffers, an average of $41,261; Republicans paid $30,969,711 to 839 staffers, an average of $36,912.

So even though DeWeese and the Democrat caucus he’s long controlled paid their staff an average of $4,349 more than their Republican counterparts, he used the “lower pay scale” argument as a way to justify awarding $1.9 million in Democrat bonuses in 2006 – 3.3 times the $566,000 awarded by House Republicans.

But there’s more to the sage. In this era of openness that DeWeese purports to embrace, you’d think he and his staff would accede to media requests and provide the aforementioned pay scale, so the press could do the logical thing and verify whether and by how much Republican staffers are paid more than comparable Democratic staffers.

For reasons known only to them, that hasn’t happened. (Nor have House Democrats released their bonus policy.) The germane question is, “If House Republicans can and have released their pay scale for the world to see, why haven’t House Democrats?” Here are the top possibilities why they haven’t: The document doesn’t exist, which is unlikely but not impossible; it contains numbers that aren’t much different than the Republicans, which would make DeWeese’s logic look misleading; or Democrats recognize they have another big problem and are trying to tinker with the pay scale in order to avoid a further public firestorm.

This is the problem when the state legislature is exempt from the state’s open records law and each caucus functions according to its own set of rules. Who even knows with absolute certainty that the pay scale released by House Democrats, if that ever happens, is indeed the one used in 2006? The press and public, with no real legal standing to obtain information, is at the mercy of the government.

It should be the other way around. It’s a travesty that House Democrats and their leader DeWeese can’t or won’t promptly reply to a simple information request for a pay scale. And it casts a long shadow over their supposed change of heart.