Pa. House delays vote on Phila. bill

Legislation to provide financial relief to Philadelphia got swept up today in the Pennsylvania budget battle, as House Democratic leaders delayed by two weeks a final vote on the bill.

"It's not in the cards right now," Majority Leader Todd Eachus said of the vote on allowing Philadelphia to raise its sales tax and defer payments to its pension fund.

Eachus (D., Luzerne) said passage was not in jeopardy. Instead, he said, Democratic leaders are angry at what they see as the Senate Republicans' failure to negotiate "in good faith" and will reconvene a bipartisan budget conference committee - which has not met in almost a month - to "lay out the facts in public."

Final House action, scheduled for Sept. 8, would be in time to keep Mayor Nutter from having to implement the contingency budget known as Plan C, involving massive layoffs and service cuts.

Philadelphia had until Monday to submit a revised five-year plan to the Pennsylvania Intergovernmental Cooperation Authority, the oversight board that must approve the city's financial plan. The city went ahead today and submitted Plan C to PICA, according to Nutter's spokesman Doug Oliver, but PICA has 15 days, or until Sept. 11, to approve it.

While some measures would have to be taken to prepare for layoffs and closings, implementation of the plan would not take effect until mid-September, with layoffs beginning Oct. 2, Nutter said this month.

At a news conference today, Eachus and House Speaker Keith McCall (D., Carbon) said that they were aware of the PICA deadline, but that passing a state spending plan for fiscal 2010 was the top priority next week.

What angered House Democrats was the size of the new state budget. They said Senate Republicans gave them a proposal yesterday of $27.5 billion - a half-billion below what they thought had been agreed upon.

"We're getting a continuous movement of the goal line" from the Senate Republicans, Eachus said.

But Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi (R., Delaware) said no spending figure had been agreed to. "I don't see any representation that we have agreed to a spending number of $28 billion," he said.

Meanwhile, as Philadelphia unions pressed House lawmakers to strip pension amendments from the city aid bill before the final vote, it appeared unlikely that they would get the Democratic leadership's support.

The bill - crafted to lift Philadelphia out of its dire financial straits - would allow the city to temporarily increase the sales tax from 7 percent to 8 percent and defer $230 million in employee pension costs for two years.

Unions have strongly objected to provisions, inserted by Senate Republicans, that would reduce benefits for new city employees by 20 percent and might limit unions in negotiating pension benefits.