Senior Judge Barry Feudale today released the statewide grand jury report focusing on deficiencies in the Pennsylvania Legislature. The investigative panel conducted an extensive investigation into the misuse of public resources and employees for campaign purposes.
Below is a complete list of the grand jury’s findings and recommendations, as well as the complete report.
Eliminate taxpayer-funded political caucuses.
Eliminate “Special Leadership Accounts,” or at least, the disbursements from such accounts should be a matter of public record and open to public inspection.
Conduct a routine full, independent audit of all legislative expenses and provide results to the public.
Ensure that each state representative has one taxpayer-funded district office and equal staff for that district office.
Create a “Rank-and-File Member’s Bill of Rights” that explicitly states what each state representative should receive, including but not limited to equal staffing and office resources for the member’s district office.
Eliminate legislative members’ per diems, or at least reduce them to actual verified expenses.
Become a true part-time legislature, with commensurate reductions in legislative salaries, staff, and staff salaries.
Limited constitutional convention to increase the length of a state representative’s term from two years to four years.
Limited constitutional convention to provide term limits for all elected members of the General Assembly.
All legislative hiring and staffing be performed by a bipartisan Human Resources Department based upon standardized, published job descriptions.
Combine HDC and HRC print shops.
Combine HDC and HRC IT departments.
Eliminate all legislative “PennDOT specialists.”
No staff or elected member of General Assembly engage in “PennDOT” work as described in the report.
Eliminate all compensatory time.
If a legislative staffer takes leave to work on a campaign, that staffer must not receive legislative money, including pay, benefits, or contribution to retirement plan.
Create a standardized written ethics policy for the entire General Assembly and annual updates to the initial ethics training administered by a bipartisan ethics oversight committee.
Budget planning process must be open and transparent.
Budget must contain, to the extent possible, all line item expenditures.
All votes related to budget or appropriations matters must be by roll call vote.
If budget is not passed on time, state legislators and the governor must forfeit all pay and per diems until passed. Any forfeited pay and/or per diems cannot be recouped in any way.
All unused budget money must be returned to the state treasury.
Banning the use of the same vendors for both legislative and campaign purposes.
All campaign entities (HDCC and HRCC) should ban any legislative staffer from the campaign entity’s premises during normal legislative work day, including during the “lunch hour.”
