Editor’s note: This is the second in a series about legislator spending. Next: Some Pa. lawmakers tout expense transparency. Their websites tell a different story.

By Angela Couloumbis

Spotlight PA

The Pennsylvania Legislature’s budget documents, as well as its annual audits, only provide totals for expenses.

What the public doesn’t see, for instance: The Legislature spent $6.5 million on mileage, another $1.1 million on meals, and $4.2 million just for legislators to stay in the capital during voting sessions, according to the analysis by The Caucus and Spotlight PA.

Of the money shelled out on that one day in March 2019, more than $23,000 - or just over 17% - went straight into lawmakers’ pockets in the form of per diems, the much-maligned, lump-sum payments for coming to the state Capitol for voting sessions, hearings, meetings, and other business that Pennsylvania’s 253 legislators are allowed to claim without providing receipts.

Lawmakers attending the session that day spent another $2,700 to feed themselves and their guests, and more than $7,000 on lodging.

And it wasn’t even a particularly expensive session day.

During the four years of expenses the news organizations examined, the legislator who claimed the most in direct payments - Rep. Chris Sainato, D-Lawrence - collected about $235,000 in per diems and reimbursement for other expenses.

That works out to about $59,000 a year, $5,000 more than the median annual household income in the county he represents. A previous Caucus/Spotlight PA investigation showed that Sainato even reimbursed himself for two pairs of walking shoes with donor dollars.

Sainato did not respond to calls and emails from reporters.

Sainato and fellow western Pennsylvania Rep. Mark Longietti, D-Mercer, were the only two lawmakers to take in more than $200,000 each over that four-year period. Longietti, too, did not return calls.

Tens of thousands of those dollars came in the form of mileage reimbursements, a category of spending that, on its own, cost taxpayers $6.5 million over four years. At the federal reimbursement rate of $0.56 per mile, that’s 11.6 million miles - more than the Apollo program racked up in four years of moon missions. The true mileage total is likely higher, as some reimbursement rates are below the federal level.

Travel during pandemic

After pandemic lockdowns began in mid-March 2020, forcing people to dramatically scale back their travel, the General Assembly still reimbursed legislators and aides $775,000 - enough to cover about 1.4 million miles at the federal rate.

Add in gas, parking, tolls, lodging, meals on the road, taxis, trains, planes, car rentals and other transportation costs, and taxpayers spent $17 million from 2017 through 2020 getting lawmakers and their staff from point A to point B.

That’s on top of the $1.3 million the Legislature paid to lease cars for lawmakers and staff over those years, an amount that includes about $1,500 for car washes.

Office life

In Pennsylvania, legislators have at least one - and sometimes up to three - satellite offices in addition to their offices inside the state Capitol complex.

Over four years, the Legislature spent more than $37 million on lawmakers’ satellite offices alone. Utility bills topped $2 million. Maintenance costs on these rental properties exceeded $2 million. And supplies such as water cooler rentals, snacks and copier leases cost more than $6.3 million.

Only one in four states makes any allowance for district offices. In places like Minnesota, for instance, lawmakers who want to meet with constituents do so in buildings the public has already paid for, such as libraries and schools.

Receipts not required

Legislators award themselves flat-rate per diems for showing up to work, whether in Harrisburg or someplace else they travel, and the rules they wrote don’t require them to present receipts.

Including money paid to staff, the General Assembly spent more than $6 million on these payments in four years. It’s far from an even distribution, though. Some members rarely if ever claimed per diems; others filed hundreds of claims. The stipends for food and lodging vary by year, but in 2020 ranged between $178 and $200.

Sainato and Longietti raked in the most by far, at $128,000 and $124,000, respectively - or more than $30,000 a year. Neither of them scaled back their per diem claims significantly during the pandemic, even after the Capitol complex shut down.

An army of lawyers

All four caucuses have state-paid lawyers on staff, but that hasn’t stopped them from charging taxpayers for outside counsel as well. Both chambers pay outside lawyers to represent them on matters ranging from election-related lawsuits to school funding litigation to sexual harassment claims.

Over four years, the Legislature paid about $20 million to 55 law firms.

Often, the public can’t even find out what work those firms are doing, let alone assess whether it’s money well-spent, because of the multiple redactions the chambers employ to mask legal work.

‘Just post it online’

Redactions of the names of people lawmakers met over lunch or dinner, along with many standard redactions of account numbers and personal addresses, led to about 4,770 transactions worth $330,000 with at least some information missing.

Legislators and their lawyers initially tried to withhold much more.

Even though financial records are among the few categories of records the Legislature is required to make public, those officials claimed a “legislative privilege” allowed them to hide, among other details, who legislators were meeting with and why while spending taxpayer money.

Lawmakers and staff sometimes use vague descriptions to explain their purchases.

For example, a House Democratic Caucus expense of $73.46 to reimburse a staffer in September 2019 had no description in the reports originally provided, and in a separate request had the memo, “To enable access to work email while away from office.”

The actual receipt of the transaction, acquired through a follow-up request, revealed a Royal Caribbean cruise receipt for a “zoom surf + stream voyage package,” otherwise known on their website as “the fastest internet at sea.”

Other expenses are shrouded by merely being described as credit card purchases, echoing the way lawmakers hide millions in campaign purchases uncovered by a previous Caucus/Spotlight PA investigation.

Rep. Seth Grove, R-York, recommends, “Just post it online. Save everybody the hassle and be done with it. To me, it’s just an easier solution for everybody involved. … With technology today you can almost automatically, at the end of the day, in real-time, do it.”

Mike Wereschagin, Brad Bumsted, and Sam Janesch of The Caucus contributed to this report.

If you learned something from this story, pay it forward and become a member of Spotlight PA so someone else can in the future at spotlightpa.org/donate. Spotlight PA is funded by foundations and readers like you who are committed to accountability journalism that gets results.