Joining us this week to recap all the greatest state politics hits of 2018, and to give some previews of what’s ahead, are Marc Levy of the AP and Liz Navratil of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
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Did you know Pennsylvania is the fourth-biggest producer of Christmas trees in the country?
About a million are cut and sold here every year. So, we figured, now is a good time to learn a little more about one of the commonwealth’s most festive industries.
To do that, we headed out to Annville, about 20 miles outside Harrisburg, to explore a tree farm.
Rod Wert and his wife Jodi own the Blue Ridge Christmas Tree Farm. They’ve been in the business for 30 years, both here and at a previous farm in Linglestown. The family also owns a second farm where they grow things like corn, rye, and soybeans, and they have a bookbinding business—Wert Bookbinding—in Grantville.
There’s a lot of planning that goes into growing trees as a crop. It takes about eight years for seedlings to get tall enough to be sold, and Rod told us a lot can happen in that time—root rot, fungus, sunburned trees…the list goes on. So, he said, tree farmers have to get creative to make sure business stays strong and a few bad years don’t set them back too much.
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Pennsylvania’s voting machines are old, as far as election equipment goes. Most of them came online around 2006 when the state got an influx of federal cash to replace even older ones. Counties are in charge of buying and maintaining the very expensive machines, so there is a wide range of models across the state.
That has led to a snafu or two.
In 2016, after the presidential election, Green Party candidate Jill Stein sued Pennsylvania. One of the grounds was that the voting machines were vulnerable to tampering, and a sticking point in the lawsuit was that a lot of the commonwealth’s machines don’t produce a paper trail. That makes a lot of people skeptical about how accurately they can be double-checked.
Governor Tom Wolf’s administration settled the lawsuit just recently. And as part of that settlement, they promised to update all the voting machines—regardless of whether they use paper ballots—before the 2020 election. Officials had already been working on the effort for several months.
A lot of people say it has to get done, one way or another. But others say the state’s playing fast-and-loose with funding. And others question whether the machines really need to be upgraded en masse.
We’re going to hear all those perspectives. First, Acting Secretary of State Robert Torres, who’s overseeing the process, explains why the state has committed to such an ambitious update. Then GOP Senator John Gordner will discuss his challenge to the administration’s largely-unilateral action on the upgrade. And finally, County Commissioner Jim Hertzler shares his funding concerns.
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If you’ve driven on the Pennsylvania Turnpike recently, you may have noticed, the tolls are high.
This year, it cost the average turnpike driver $1.30 to go through a toll if they were using an EZ Pass, and $2.10 if they paid cash. Next year, that’ll go up eight cents for EZ Pass users, and 15 for cash. Truckers pay even more.
Tolls have gone up every single year since 2009, and are now about 200 percent higher than they were a decade ago. It’s more expensive to drive through Pennsylvania than New York, or New Jersey, or Ohio. And it looks like those costs will keep rising in the foreseeable future.
Now, you might—reasonably—ask, where’s all the money going?
The answer is complicated. But basically, in 2007, the state passed a law—Act 44—that said the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission had to pay 450 million dollars to the Department of Transportation every year. About half that money would go toward mass transit projects, and the rest would go toward non-turnpike highway improvements.
The turnpike raised tolls to cover the costs…and then kept raising them. In 2014, the state passed a new law routing all the turnpike funding toward mass transit, and significantly reducing the payments after 2022. But there’s no guarantee tolls will stop going up.
That’s an issue for a lot of people in the commonwealth. Lawmakers—including Governor Tom Wolf—have said they’re concerned the cost to use the turnpike drives drivers elsewhere. And it also has the potential to hurt Pennsylvania’s trucking industry.
So in this episode, we visit a truck stop. We also talk to the president of a trucking advocacy group that’s suing the state, and get a rundown of the situation from the perspective of a longtime turnpike official.
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