Author: julrich

A new legislative session is dawning in Harrisburg, and with that comes a lot of change.

This week, the state Capitol was flooded with family and friends and supporters of dozens of new lawmakers, as they were sworn in for the next two years.

The House and Senate also approved a whole bunch of changes to the internal rules that’ll govern them this session. Plus, House Republicans have announced their new slate of committee chairs—people who have a lot of influence on which bills get heard in the chamber.

Stephen Caruso from the PLS Reporter and Charlie Thompson of PennLive join us to discuss what this all means—plus, we’ll hear directly from newly-minted House Majority Leader Bryan Cutler.

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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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Pennsylvania has the tightest absentee ballot law in the country. Where most states allow them to be postmarked by Election Day, the commonwealth denies any ballot that doesn’t arrive at its county election office by the Friday before the election. It allows ballots to be sent out to voters just a few days before that—which can mean a pretty tight turnaround time.

This issue was displayed prominently in the aftermath of the midterm election when, facing a losing margin of less than 100 votes, State Representative and Democratic Senate candidate Tina Davis sued her county in an effort to get late absentee ballots counted.

Davis’s lawsuit failed. Her opponent argued it would amount to “changing the rules of the contest after the contest is over.” But she’s now determined to bring the issue to the legislature—and there are some Republicans on board.

Plus, the American Civil Liberties Union has a lawsuit pending that aims to ease the ballot policy once and for all.

On this episode, we’ll talk to all the people involved, and try to figure out the odds of anything changing.

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WITF, Transforming Health, and PA Post are launching a series on mental health called Through the Cracks. Over a number of months, we’ll be covering the realities of people who live with mental illness, the stigmas involved, and how public policy can help—or, often, hurt—vulnerable people.
The first installment was reported by Brett Sholtis, who took a close look at why people with serious mental health issues often wait a really, really long time for the services they need.
We’ll explain the wide-ranging impact of state’s transition away from institutionalizing the mentally ill, toward integrating patients into communities. We’ll discuss why state mental health funding has declined over the last 25 years, and we’ll preview some of the stories Brett is tackling later in the series.
Plus, Kiera McGuire, a producer for WITF and Transforming Health, will discuss a story she recently reported about one all-to-common side effect of chronic mental health issues: homelessness.

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The election is over, and you may have heard, Pennsylvania Democrats picked up some new congressional seats–and helped flip the U.S. House of Representatives.

Meanwhile, Democrats in the state House and Senate also made progress. The Senate flipped at least five seats and ended a Republican supermajority–and the House snagged at least eleven–thought to be their largest pickup since 1974.

That’s not enough to give them majorities in either chamber, but it will mean some changes in how Harrisburg operates.

Appearing on Smart Talk are journalists Marc Levy, Associated Press, and Charles Thompson, Pennlive to discuss the implications.

Democratic State Representative Patty Kim and Republican Representative Greg Rothman also join Smart Talk to explain how their caucus’s prospects will change–and what the shifting numbers mean for collaboration between the parties.

Also, this election saw four states voting to change their redistricting methods–Carol Kuniholm with Fair Districts PA will discuss what that will mean for stalled efforts to do the same in Pennsylvania.

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On Saturday, eleven people were murdered in a Pittsburgh synagogue, and six others were injured. A man named Robert Bowers was arrested and has been charged with anti-Semitic hate crimes. He has pleaded not guilty.

In the days since, members of Pittsburgh’s robust Jewish community have been grappling with the sudden deaths of their own, the hatefulness of the crime, and being thrust suddenly into a national political spotlight.

Lucy Perkins, Virginia Alvino Young, and Margaret Krauss—all of Pittsburgh public radio station WESA—join us this week to explain what’s going on, what people are feeling, and what the weeks ahead look like for the city.

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At the time of this podcast recording, we’re less than two weeks from an important election. Nationally, Democrats are trying to take back the congressional majority—and Pennsylvania is a huge part of that effort.

This week, WITF and Keystone Crossroads reporter Emily Previti joins us to explain how voter registration is shaking out in the commonwealth—and to assess whether this is, in fact, an exceptional year for the left. WHYY’s Jim Saksa will also drop in to talk about why any inroads Democrats make in Congress probably won’t extend to state House and Senate races.

Plus, PA Post’s Ed Mahon will help answer a bunch of listener questions. If you have a question of your own, shoot us an email at podcast@papost.org.

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The state House and Senate ended their legislative session with a bang Wednesday night. Negotiations on a priority statute of limitations bill—which aimed to make it easier for victims of child sexual abuse to sue abusers—melted down. Plus, polling!

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