State of the State by PA Post

The legislative session is finally kicking off in earnest, and lawmakers seem to be taking that as a cue to launch as many initiatives as they can, as fast as they can.

This week, we’ll explain three divisive (and perennial) causes Governor Tom Wolf is throwing his weight behind: gun control, a minimum wage hike, and a severance tax on natural gas drillers.

Plus, we’ll recap two burgeoning efforts on election overhauls and probation and parole reform that are getting an unusual (for Harrisburg) amount of bipartisan support.

And finally, we’ll go behind the scenes on reporter Emily Previti’s excavation of data from the 2018 election, and the surprising insight she got into the impact congressional redistricting had on the result.

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This has been a quiet week in the state Capitol. Lawmakers are lying low, introducing legislation, and prepping for their first real session days in the coming week.

But life goes on outside Harrisburg.

This week, we’re bringing you two stories. One is about a festering conflict between a neighborhood and a massive gas company. And the other on a young Pennsylvania man who was recently killed in a war that’s been dragging on since he was a child.

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Tom Wolf has been sworn in for his second—and final—term as Pennsylvania’s governor. Wolf gave a low-key inaugural address, touting the bipartisan successes of his first four years in office and urging his fellow lawmakers to find common ground despite their often-intractable differences.

There weren’t a lot of policy specifics—Wolf seems to be saving those for his budget address February 5th. But the governor did allude to some of Pennsylvania’s most deep-rooted issues, like its inexorably aging population and the fact that it habitually loses more educated young people than it attracts.

The week also saw growing alarm over the lengthening federal government shutdown. More than 12,000 people around the commonwealth are furloughed or working without pay, and the state is starting to see an impact.

We’ll hear from the Department of Labor and Industry, which is seeing an upswing in people filing for unemployment, from the Central Pennsylvania Food Bank, which is upping services for federal workers, and from Senate Democrats, who are trying to help SNAP recipients prepare for shutdown-related changes to the program.

And finally, we’ll get an update from the small town of Tamaqua, about an hour to the northwest of Allentown, where residents are embroiled in a debate—and legal proceedings—over how to keep kids safe at school.

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Picture a farmer.

If you’re like a lot of people, the first thing that popped into your brain might have been a man in overalls and a big hat, maybe standing in a field, possibly on the older side.

Of course, you know that’s a caricature. Anyone can be a farmer. Still, the image of an older male farmer is pervasive, and if you visit the Pennsylvania Farm Show, it may not appear all that inaccurate.

But farming is changing, in Pennsylvania and elsewhere.

For one thing, farmers are aging. The USDA’s 2012 agriculture census found that of the commonwealth’s 7.7 million acres of farmland, 41 percent is owned by people 55 or older. It also found that while 4,909 farmers in the commonwealth are 34 and younger, 16,725 are 65 and older—more than three times as many.

For comparison, the 2002 survey found 5,186 farmers 34 and younger and 12,816 farmers 65 and older.

Plus, while family farming is still a tenet of the industry, particularly when it comes to smaller farms, it’s increasingly common for farmers’ children to opt out of the family business.

So this year at the Pennsylvania Farm Show, we talked to a lot of farmers—longtime farmers, new farmers, future farmers—to learn how they think the industry is going to keep evolving and changing in the years to come.

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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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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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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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