By the Philadelphia Council AFL-CIO

– In a bizarre press conference yesterday, that drew quick condemnation from leaders in both parties, Tom Corbett announced that he had signed the budget, while issuing line-item vetoes of approximately 72 million in spending. The cuts were apparently intended to be punitive, as a reaction to the General Assembly’s refusal to pass Corbett’s signature pension reforms. In the press conference, Tom Corbett railed against unions, identifying them as ‘special interests’ who were working to block his agenda.

Corbett has yet to explain how the line-item vetoes he issued relate to the pension fight, or more importantly, how his pension plan would provide any relief to taxpayers. To learn more about why the Governor is wrong on pensions,

Pensions

By The PA. AFL-CIO

Currently there are attempts being made to replace pensions that workers have earned and contributed to. Elected officials have admitted that it is the fault of Wall Street and themselves for poor investment returns and underfunding, yet they want workers to pay for those mistakes. We must fight back with the truth.

Here are three things you should know about state employee pensions:

Employees have been paying their fair share all along, contributing between 6% and 10% of every paycheck to their pension, even when the Commonwealth and many school districts failed to make their contributions.
Politicians are trying to make public employees pay for mistakes made by the greed on Wall Street… but the changes they are proposing will actually cost the taxpayers MORE money!
Act 120, the 2010 Pension Reform Law passed with bipartisan support already reduced pension benefits and raised the retirement age for new employees. Now politicians need to fulfill their promise by honoring the commitments they made. Give Act 120 a chance to work!

The fact is that our public pension systems in PA are not facing a ‘fiscal cliff’, and there is plenty of time to allow the meaningful reforms of Act 120 to prove their value.

Check back here often and follow the blog below for updates on this critical legislative issue that affects so many working families in Pennsylvania.

Source: http://www.paaflcio.org/?page_id=158

By Olivia Sandbothe

– The National Education Association made history this 4th of July when delegates at its annual assembly voted in new leaders, making it the first major union headed by three women of color. Lily Eskelsen García, former Utah Teacher of the Year, will serve as the union’s new president, Becky Pringle will be the new vice president and Princess Moss will take over as secretary-treasurer, effective Sept. 1, 2014.

AFSCME extends hearty congratulations to the new leaders.

“As public employee unions, AFSCME and the NEA have core values in common, particularly our commitment to serving the communities where we work,” said AFSCME Pres. Lee Saunders. “We look forward to standing with President Eskelsen García, Vice President Pringle and Secretary-Treasurer Moss in our shared battle for dignity and rights.”

Saunders also expressed his appreciation to outgoing Pres. Dennis Van Roekel, who set an example of service and solidarity during his six years of leadership.

“Dennis has been a force for unity in the labor movement and for protecting all public services,” Saunders said. “As someone who is truly committed to solidarity, he has taken on the fight for workers’ rights not just for his own members, but for all working people.”

Source: http://www.afscme.org/blog/historic-nea-elections

By Maryam Adamu

– This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Years of organizing and civil disobedience culminated in a seminal piece of legislation prohibiting discrimination based on race, color, religion, national origin, and sex.

A few years after the Civil Rights Act was passed, Martin Luther King Jr. asked, “What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t earn enough money to buy a hamburger?” It is important to realize what King always understood: The civil rights movement was about both social and economic justice. It was about ensuring that everyone has the right—as well the means—to be successful in this country.

Fifty years later, as the nation reflects upon the profound impact of this fundamental legislation, it is clear the country has made considerable progress in key areas. Still, barriers to progress persist and must be identified and addressed. This report begins with an overview of the nation’s progress. It then goes on to describe how conditions have fundamentally changed over the past few decades, especially since the Great Recession.

Finally, taking these changes into account, this report offers policy recommendations for establishing economic security as a civil right. These recommendations include:

• Raise the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour to increase the collective income of people of color by $16.1 billion.
• Increase federal investment in job-creation programs that prioritize generating job opportunities for youth and low-income and long-term unemployed adults.
• Invest in workforce development to prepare people for higher-skill, higher-wage jobs.
• Strengthen the social safety net to ensure that people can meet basic needs as they get back on their feet.
• Expand access to crucial benefits, including paid family leave and paid sick days.
• Eliminate employment discrimination for people with criminal records to expand the possibilities for those who were formerly incarcerated.
• Reinvest in neighborhoods by expanding the Promise Zones initiative and offer planning grants and tax incentives for neighborhoods.

As the country’s economic climate changes and people of color grow to represent a majority of Americans, it is a moral and economic imperative that the United States pursue polices now to ensure that everyone has a chance at prosperity. This report lays out a pathway forward as the nation seeks to make good on the promises of the civil rights era and to advance them for future generations.

Source: http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/report/2014/07/10/93607/dignified-jobs-and-decent-wages/?elq=~~eloqua..type–emailfield..syntax–recipientid~~&elqCampaignId=~~eloqua..type–campaign..campaignid–0..fieldname–id~~

By Patrick Kerkstra

Every so often, when Mayor Nutter opens his mouth, a little gem tumbles out that captures matters perfectly. Yesterday, it was a five carat diamond.

“We are caught in a vortex of political hell with no way out,” Nutter told reporters. Later, he mentioned ping pong.

At issue is the cigarette tax for city schools, which is a questionable policy on its own, but also the closest thing the district has right now to a lifeline. Yesterday morning, it looked like a lock. But that was before the State Senate voted to put its growing feud with the House of Representatives and the tender concerns of the tobacco lobby ahead of the School District of Philadelphia and its 191,000 students, adding a five-year sunset provision to the tax and putting its final passage at risk.

How did this happen? Didn’t the Senate approve the tax sunset-free on June 30?

Well, yes. But then the House got the bill, and while the House shocked all by accepting the cigarette tax, its version of the legislation gave an assist to city charter schools and took out a few provisions unrelated to the cigarette tax but near-and-dear to the hearts of Senate Republican leaders like Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi (see here and here).

That gave the Senate a second chance to tinker (ping pong), gave the tobacco lobbyists the entree they’d been looking for (which is definitely political hell), and now everything the district thought it had won, meager though it was, is suddenly at grave risk (a vortex of, say, potential doom).

Now it’s back to the House, which has scheduled a rare summer session to take the matter up again.

Philadelphia Democrats in Harrisburg are howling about all of this, with the peculiar exception of State Senator Anthony Williams, the Democratic whip. On Monday, he claimed credit for his role in moving the cigarette tax (Williams introduced the tax authorization bill) in a joint appearance with Mayor Nutter. On Tuesday, he was the lone Democrat in the Senate to vote for the amendment sun-setting the tax after five years.

Yesterday, shortly before the votes on the bill, Williams told me that “the tobacco lobbyists are up here, not trying to kill it but inflict pain upon it.” He described the five-year-sunsetting as a better option than “more egregious” alternatives the lobby was pushing.

“We basically said, look, we need to vote it out of there, we’ll accept a five year sunshine,” Williams said, when asked why he would support the sunset provision. “A cigarette tax is not a permanent funding solution for the schools, and if it works, it’ll probably get renewed.”

I suspect some version of the cigarette tax will ultimately pass. But that’s obviously not a sure thing. And if the district does get a tax with a five-year lifespan, it’ll be difficult for Superintendent Hite to do long-term fiscal planning. One of the Philadelphia school district’s many problems is the lurching about it’s been forced to do each year to find stopgap funding, instead of being able to rely on a predictable stream of revenue, like the rest of the districts in the state.

A five-year cigarette tax would also be a far, far cry from the grand bargain that seemed, fleetingly, to be in the works earlier in budget negotiations. According to sources, the proposed framework of the deal looked roughly like this:

• A new tax on Marcellus Shale gas extraction, with annual revenue of between $200 million (which Republicans were willing to accept) to $600 million (which Democrats were angling for).
• The issuance of pension obligation bonds, both to shore up the state’s pension fund and free up short-term cash for school districts like Philadelphia’s that are buckling under extreme pension payments.
• A rollback on pension benefits for new state employees, either in the form of mandatory 401(k)-type plan, or a mandatory hybrid plan.
• New funding of around $70 million for the “charter reimbursement” line of the state budget, which would have translated into significant new funds for school districts like Philadelphia’s that have a lot of charter operators.
• In all likelihood, the cigarette tax would have been included in a final deal as well.

If that framework had held up, the district would have been looking at more than $60 million in new state funding, plus the $80 million or so the cigarette tax is estimated to net the district in its early years.

That’s the kind of investment that shuts off the sirens at district headquarters, the kind of money that returns counselors and nurses and librarians and aides to city schools. It’s the sort of cash that gives Hite and his team a fighting chance to make schools better.

But the framework, which was being assembled principally by Pileggi and Williams, fell apart before it matured into a concrete proposal, and it’s not hard to see why. There’s a pretty vast spread between a $200 million shale tax and a $600 million one. I think it’s unlikely many Republicans in the Senate or the House would have accepted $600 million in new taxes, and I doubt many Democrats in either chamber would have been willing to cross their allies in the public employee unions, certainly not on the cheap.

Perhaps, if it was not a gubernatorial election year, Philly Democrats in safe seats would have been freer to vote in the interests of the school district, and perhaps they would even have had the silent blessing of party leaders. That might have been enough to clear the Senate and give the deal a soupcon of bipartisan flavor.

But it is an election year. And it would surely take a lot of Democratic votes in a Republican House as conservative as this one to pass any budget that included hundreds of millions of dollars in new taxes.

And that’s to say nothing of Gov. Corbett, who resisted the shale tax throughout (though I do think he would have had little choice but to sign off on a grand bargain if it had made it to his desk in an election year).

You get the drift. Republicans say Democrats wouldn’t bend, Democrats say the same of Republicans, and in the end we have a still-unsigned, status-quo budget and the prospect of no new money for city schools.

It would be simplistic and reductive to proclaim a pox on both their houses. Republicans control state government top-to-bottom, full stop. But I don’t see any profiles in courage on the Democratic side of the aisle here either.

“A vortex of political hell” indeed.

Source: http://www.phillymag.com/news/2014/07/09/cigarette-tax-fail/

By Kevin McCorry

– The passage of the Philadelphia cigarette tax hit a major setback Tuesday.

The Pennsylvania Senate approved the tax, but added provisions as part of an omnibus package that will yet again need the blessing of the House of Representatives, which is not scheduled to return to a voting session until the fall.

The Philadelphia School District had been desperately hoping the Senate would allow the House version of the cigarette tax – approved in dramatic fashion last week – to pass unscathed.

But Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi, R-Delaware, added an amendment to the bill that would “sunset” the tax after five years and prohibit the school district from borrowing against cigarette tax proceeds.

Philadelphia Schools Superintendent William Hite immediately blasted the move in a written statement, calling it an action that “throws us back into uncertainty.”

“At full implementation, the cigarette tax was estimated to generate more than $80 million annually,” said Hite. “Ending the tax in five years will exacerbate our structural deficit, complicate our long-term planning efforts, make it harder to access the capital markets, and strip our schools of educational services and supports.”

The district currently faces a $93 million budget gap merely to provide last year’s admittedly “insufficient,” bare-bones level of services.

“With schools scheduled to open in less that two months, it is crucial that we secure the needed funding to support our students and schools,” said Hite. “We implore the House and Senate to come to agreement immediately on cigarette tax legislation that does not include a sunset provision.”

Delays, amendments could shorten school year

Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter was in Harrisburg lobbying for the measure to pass without changes.

Nutter spokesman Mark McDonald said the amendments threaten the district’s ability to operate a full school year.

“Every week without this tax in place will cost the district money,” he said. “It is a terrible situation for the district and one that the mayor hopes can be resolved by House and Senate coming together and abandoning this sunset provision.”

Stephen Miskin, spokesman for House Republicans, said it was “unclear” when the House would come back for a voting session.

He also expressed displeasure with the fact that the bill as passed by the Senate added other provisions, including various hotel taxes and monies for City Revitalization and Improvement Zones.

“It will very difficult to pass House Bill 1177 if it is loaded with all these hotel taxes and new CRIZs, which could cost the state up to $70 million,” Miskin said. “We certainly preferred legislation focused on quality education for the kids in Philadelphia.”

State Sen. Vincent Hughes, D-Philadelphia, had tried to force an up-or-down vote on an older version of the bill, sans amendments, but the motion failed.

“It’s very possible we could be in a pingpong effect, where the bill goes back and forth, back and forth,” said Hughes, “because the House could make further amendments and send it back to the Senate.”

Senate Democrats estimate that the school district loses $1.6 million every week that the implementation of the cigarette tax is delayed.

As the cigarette tax theater has unfolded, both legislative bodies have been waiting for Gov. Tom Corbett to sign the budget plan they passed. Corbett has so far refused to do so, demanding the General Assembly to tackle pension reform before giving his blessing.

Corbett, who has expressed support for the cigarette tax, could attempt to lure the Legislature back into session by vetoing all or parts of the budget.

Tobacco lobby mobilizes

The Senate passed a version of cigarette tax a week ago that didn’t include the new provisions.

Hughes blamed the influence of the tobacco lobby.

“This is a cigarette tax. You have to assume that the cigarette lobby got engaged in this process and tried to make changes in the legislation,” he said. “All our information indicates that those are the individuals who drove the process.”

Sen. Anthony Hardy Williams, D-Philadelphia, echoed that sentiment, referencing the tobacco lobby’s influence with Senate President Pro Tempore Joseph Scarnati, R-Jefferson, who represents tobacco growing districts in western Pennsylvania.

“They have a relationship. He represents them to some capacity, so they I guess they lobby him on behalf of his constituents,” said Williams.

A spokeswoman for Senate Republicans said she could not comment.  Pileggi declined an interview request. Appropriations chair Jake Corman, R-Centre, could not be reached.

Pileggi’s amendment was added in the Senate Rules Committee,  which has three members of the Philadelphia delegation, Hughes, Williams and Sen. Christine Tartaglione, also a Democrat.

Williams, who on Monday with Mayor Nutter urged swift passage of the cigarette tax, departed from his Democratic colleagues in joining Pileggi to vote for the amendment.

Williams defended his vote as a “good will” nod to the realities of the political process.

He reasoned that Pileggi’s amendment also reintroduced language that allows some counties to increase their tax on hotel room rentals.

This language was stripped in the House version of the bill, upsetting senators who represent those districts.

“It’s a balance. You have to take into consideration other members’ concerns and their priorities as you’re advancing your own,” said Williams. “Whatever their needs are, I think they should be addressed, and that’s why we voted for it the first time.”

Things may have been different if his were the deciding vote on the matter.

“If I thought it was the deciding vote, I may have made a different decision,” Williams said. “But it wasn’t.”

Adding a sunset provision to the cigarette tax was a far better alternative than some of the other amendments being pushed by the tobacco lobby, including measures that would have further slowed the implementation of the tax and reduced the rate of collection, Williams said.

Source: http://www.newsworks.org/index.php/homepage-feature/item/70165-philly-cigarette-tax-for-schools-stalled-in-legislative-pingpong-match?linktype=hp_impact