HARRISBURG - The Pennsylvania Legislature got to work at 1 p.m. on March 18, 2019.

Three and a half hours later on that Monday afternoon, lawmakers had adjourned.

They passed eight bills, four of which eventually became law and none of which was controversial or particularly groundbreaking. One established a promotional board for distilled spirits. Two dealt with agricultural conservation easements.

Lawmakers’ short workday cost taxpayers $133,219.23 - more than twice the median household income of their constituents. That doesn’t include the day’s portion of their $90,000 salaries, or the thousands more spent to fund their health care and pension benefits. Nor does it include the compensation for the army of aides who staff the nation’s largest full-time state legislature.

The money, tucked in an array of expense accounts with little transparency, is a sliver of the $203 million total the General Assembly spent from 2017 through 2020 just to feed, house, transport, and provide rental offices and other perks for lawmakers and their staffs, according to a database of nearly 400,000 transactions created by The Caucus and Spotlight PA during a yearlong investigation. That averages to more than $51 million a year.

About one in 10 of those dollars - $20 million in all over the four years - went into lawmakers’ pockets in the form of reimbursements for meals, mileage subsidies, per diems, and other expenses. That’s on top of salaries that are already among the highest of any legislature in the nation, dinners on the dime of lobbyists and industry groups, and access to campaign war chests that some have used for everything from a new pair of sneakers to a jaunt through Europe.

Keeping track of spending

Records documenting that spending legally belong to the people who ultimately foot the bill: the taxpayers. But in practice, citizens who want to see what lawmakers are buying with their money face an array of barriers, delays and even pushback from lawyers hired by the General Assembly with yet more taxpayer money, the news organizations found.

When the records finally do arrive, they’re not in easy-to-analyze formats such as spreadsheets. Rather, the Legislature provides the data in PDF files that can run more than 1,000 pages, some of which aren’t text-searchable. Redactions, some of which strain credulity, are routine.

“There’s a reason they make this information hard to get,” said Tim Potts, a retired top-level House staffer and now a citizen activist. “It’s not a good reason. It’s a reason that’s self-serving rather than serving the public.”

“It’s a political motivation to protect themselves,” he said.

Records not required

Unlike Congress, whose members’ expenses are routinely posted online, Pennsylvania’s Legislature as a rule doesn’t require lawmakers to publish those records.

A few legislators have, over the years, chosen to post expenses on their websites - but even then, those listings rarely provide a complete accounting of how much and on what lawmakers are spending taxpayer money, The Caucus and Spotlight PA found.

Legislative leaders haven’t clamored to make it a requirement. In fact, of the four top leaders in the House and Senate, only two post a portion of their expenses on their official websites. Of the two, Senate President Pro Tempore Jake Corman hasn’t updated his in six years.

In interviews, several leaders said they would “consider” requiring the Legislature’s expenses be posted online and in a way that is easily digestible. Only one - Corman - said he will champion the change.

In an interview last month, the Centre County Republican acknowledged that obtaining detailed, usable information about the Legislature’s expenses is currently “cumbersome and difficult.”

He said he is working with Senate officials to make the chamber’s expenses more readily available, including posting the records online.

“There will be some generalities to it, but still, I think it will solve a couple of things,” he said. “One, it will let the public review what we are doing. And also as a member, you are a little more careful about what expenses you are doing, which you should be.”

Corman said he has already broached the idea with members of his caucus and did not receive any “negative feedback.”

A financial ‘time warp’

Operating one of the largest-in-numbers legislatures in the country isn’t free, lawmakers and their supporters say. There are costs, sometimes significant.

Yet more than a decade ago, a grand jury investigating state lawmakers’ misuse of public money recommended the General Assembly make dramatic changes to how it conducted its business - including making changes to its spending practices.

In a highly unusual report that became public, the grand jurors called on the Legislature to move to a part-time work schedule and impose term limits. The grand jurors also recommended eliminating taxpayer-funded partisan caucuses, requiring receipts for reimbursement for lodging and food, and reducing the number of district offices to one per legislator.

It also recommended that the Legislature’s budget itemize spending, rather than lumping expenditures under broad categories that mean little to the general public.

“The lack of transparency regarding the General Assembly (especially regarding all expenditures of public funds) is one of the major reasons the General Assembly remains in a ‘time warp,’?” the grand jurors wrote in 2010, in what came to be known as the Bonusgate political corruption scandal in the Capitol.

None of those changes was implemented.

“When I read it, I believed those were very good ideas. Wearing my practical hat, I realized the chance of that becoming a reality was unlikely,” former Gov. Tom Corbett, who as attorney general in the early 2000s oversaw the grand jury, said in a recent interview.