Pa. House OKs a $45.5 billion spending plan, as Gov. Josh Shapiro plans to veto his own school voucher proposal

HARRISBURG — The Pennsylvania House approved a $45.5 billion state budget Wednesday night, following a five-day impasse over a controversial school voucher program that Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro helped create and now plans to kill.

House Democrats and about 15 Republicans approved the budget Wednesday night by a 117-86 vote, after Shapiro announced he’d veto the $100 million voucher line item that the Republican-led state Senate approved last week. Instead, Shapiro said, legislative leaders will work to add a school voucher program or add to existing tax credit programs in the future.

The announcement marked a reversal in position for Shapiro as he negotiated his first budget since he took office in January. The annual state spending plan was already overdue; Pennsylvania’s new fiscal year began on Saturday. And budget talks are far from over, as several omnibus code bills that outline how the state spends its funds still need to be approved.

”Our commonwealth should not be plunged into a painful, protracted budget impasse while our communities wait for the help and resources this commonsense budget will deliver,” Shapiro said in a statement.

The spending plan was an overall win for Shapiro, with more than $567 million in new spending for public education and a number of his budget priorities getting funded, such as free school breakfast and $50 million for home repairs.

But he will not come out unscathed: Shapiro upset public education advocates and his House Democratic allies in his pursuits of school choice options. Then Senate Republicans accused him of reneging on an agreement after working with them to put together the budget.

Three top Senate Republicans — President Pro Tempore Kim Ward (R., Westmoreland), Majority Leader Joe Pittman (R., Indiana) and Senate Appropriations Chair Scott Martin (R., Lancaster) slammed Shapiro for his school voucher reversal in a statement released Wednesday night.

“We negotiated in good faith and were eager to stand with Gov. Shapiro on one of his priority campaign commitments — supporting school choice opportunities,” the three Senate GOP leaders said. “Today, Gov. Shapiro has decided to betray the good-faith agreement we reached, leaving tens of thousands of children across Pennsylvania in failing schools.

“It is a shame the governor does not have enough respect and standing within his own party to follow through with his promise,” the leaders added, in their harshest rebuke of Shapiro since he took office earlier this year. “Strong leadership requires the ability to bring people together, but instead we are met with Gov. Shapiro’s failure to deliver his commitment to empower parents and give children access to educational opportunities.”

Shapiro had supported the Senate’s plan for private-school vouchers for students who are eligible to attend the state’s lowest-performing public schools — as long as it included his other spending priorities, such as universal free school breakfast and public education funding increases.

House Democrats, however, opposed any school voucher program, fearing that it would take money away from public schools. House Majority Leader Matt Bradford (D., Montgomery) said any voucher proposal would fail among his members, and a House committee last week vetoed a separate bill that would formally create a school voucher program.

“While I am disappointed the two parties could not come together, Leader Bradford has given me his word ... that he will carefully examine and consider additional education options,” Shapiro said.

In a Wednesday letter to Pittman, Bradford said top House Democrats will host joint hearings this summer about proposed school vouchers and existing tax credit programs to improve Pennsylvania students’ educational outcomes. He added that legislators need to consider the landmark Commonwealth Court decision earlier this year that ruled the state’s current education funding system is unconstitutional before moving forward on any alternate programs.

House Democrats and Shapiro’s administration also believed that the line-item veto was not necessary and that House Democrats could approve the budget and let the voucher money sit, unspent, in a state Treasury account unless lawmakers passed accompanying legislation.

In other words, the money would be set aside, but couldn’t be spent until lawmakers created the voucher program. But Shapiro went further and said he’d veto the line item once House lawmakers passed the budget.

“This is just one of several initiatives important to me that have passed in one chamber but not the other,” Shapiro said, noting statute of limitation reform, increasing the minimum wage, and more.

Senate Republicans approved the budget with more spending than they had wanted. Their only request: Give us our school voucher program, a long-sought priority for GOP lawmakers and big-money conservative advocacy groups.

“This budget that we put together was put together with the governor as an agreement, as a whole package,” Ward said last week. “If they pull out our priorities ... you’re going to see a very slimmed-down, scaled-back budget, because there were things in this budget that we really didn’t want to do.”

The House is expected to return to session on Thursday, but it’s unclear when legislators from either chamber will act on the accompanying code bills that outline how the state should spend its money.

House Republicans already raised concerns that many of Shapiro’s new budget initiatives don’t have the accompanying legislation to give the state the authority to spend the set-aside money. For example, Shapiro secured $7.5 million for Pennsylvania public defenders’ offices for the first time in state history, as well as $20 million for historically disadvantaged businesses. Both proposals need to get legislative approval from the House and Senate that outlines how that money can be spent, before it can actually be spent.

House Republican Appropriations Chair Seth Grove (R., York) questioned how the governor and legislators will be able to work together after Shapiro betrayed Republicans’ trust.

“How do we trust anything that anybody says in this body? How do we find agreements, how do we find bipartisanship?” Grove asked as part of his floor remarks. “How do we work together moving forward if we can’t count on the simple handshake agreements?”

To complete the budget process, both the House and Senate must still pass legislation that outlines how the state can spend money. They also must complete a routine task of signing the spending bill that they already approved before it can go to Shapiro for his signature. But the Senate isn’t scheduled to reconvene until September, and its leaders had announced no plans as of Wednesday morning to return to Harrisburg.

Susan Spicka, executive director of the pro-public-education Education Voters PA advocacy group, said Shapiro’s line-item veto to voucher spending would ensure “there is no ambiguity about this.”

”We cannot have vouchers in Pennsylvania, period. We need to comply with the court ruling and deal with public education,” Spicka said, referring to the Commonwealth Court decision that found the state’s school funding system unconstitutional.

School choice advocates were quick to criticize Shapiro for back tracking on his earlier agreement with Senate Republicans.

Matthew Brouillette, the president and CEO of the conservative group Commonwealth Partners, slammed Shapiro for giving up the fight to help kids “trapped in failing schools.”

“He claims he wins big fights, but in the first big fight of his administration — with kids’ futures on the line — he left the court without even taking one shot,” Brouillette said in a statement. “Today, Gov. Shapiro shows who really runs this state, and it’s not him.”