Bailout
The Pennsylvania Legislature has been bailed out twice this past week after it failed to take action on two important pieces of legislation.
The first bailout came from the Department of Homeland Security, which last week granted the state until June 5 to come into compliance with the federal REAL ID law.
The law was passed by Congress in 2012 as a result of recommendations from the 9/11 Commission in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. Among other things, the act requires that state driver’s licenses include enhanced security features, making it harder for terrorists to obtain fraudulent driver’s licenses.
The act was met with much skepticism in Harrisburg with some lawmakers expressing concerns about the cost of providing new licenses for all Pennsylvania drivers, while others feared that the licenses would lead to a national ID card.
The state Legislature passed a bill in 2012, expressly forbidding the state Department of Transportation from complying with the law.
The DHS phased in the law, giving many states, including Pennsylvania, several extensions to come into compliance.
However, Pennsylvania never showed any signs of wanting to comply with the law, so the DHS ordered the commonwealth to take part in the program, beginning Jan. 30. As of that day, residents would have needed a passport or some other form of identification for admittance to all federal facilities, including military bases and nuclear power plants.
More importantly, Pennsylvania residents would have needed a passport or some other form of identification to fly anywhere beginning Jan. 22, 2018. Currently, passports are only needed to travel overseas.
However, thanks to the extension, those measures might be avoided. Republican leaders in the state Legislature have finally come to their senses and agreed to work with Gov. Tom Wolf on solving the problem.
There are still questions surrounding the timetable for issuing the new licenses and the cost of providing them, but at least a solution seems to be at hand.
The second bailout was given by the Supreme Court, allowing lawmakers additional time to fix a portion of the Pennsylvania Race Horse Development and Gaming Act.
The act mandated that the state’s regular casinos make payments to the counties where they are located. However, a casino outside Philadelphia claimed the tax was unconstitutional because all the regular casinos had to make the same payment regardless of their size. The court ruled in the casino’s favor back in September and gave the state Legislature until today to amend the legislation. However, talks broke down as legislators from counties without casinos demanded that their constituents receive some of the gambling revenue.
Without the extension, casinos would have been no longer required to make any payments to host counties.
That had Fayette County officials very concerned. The Lady Luck Casino at the Nemacolin Woodlands Resort in Wharton Township was exempt from the tax since it was a resort casino, but it was still required to pay the county 2 percent of the gross terminal revenues from the casino. The 2013-15 county receipts totaled $1.1 million with the 2015-16 allocation at $649,105.
There is hope that with the June 5 extension, lawmakers will be able to come to some agreement on how to distribute the gambling revenues. However, unlike the REAL ID act, Republican lawmakers, haven’t reached any agreement on gambling. The issue is expected to be hotly debated in the state Legislature with the outcome far from certain.
In the end, lawmakers had better be prepared to get down to brass tacks and come up with some sort of an agreement concerning gambling revenues. Otherwise, counties with a casino, such as Fayette and Washington counties, will lose hundreds of thousands of dollars which have helped local residents in countless ways.