Published in The Intelligencer, by Crissa Shoemaker DeBree

March 7, 2014

Lt. Gov. Jim Cawley was in Bristol Township Friday to outline Gov. Tom Corbett's budget plan for members of the Lower Bucks County Chamber of Commerce.

Corbett's $29.4 billion spending plan — a 3.6 percent increase over the current budget — includes more money for education and public welfare, seeks to address the growing crisis of underfunded pensions and uses funds from increased gas taxes to fix state roads and bridges.

"In the three years since Tom Corbett and I were hired to do a job, we've faced some significant challenges," Cawley said Friday. "Including the fact that we all saw an economy that perhaps was the worst in our lifetime."

But conditions have improved, Cawley said; on Friday, state officials announced that the state's unemployment rate had dropped to 6.4 percent in January, the lowest level in almost five years.

Corbett's budget directs $10.1 billion toward public education in Pennsylvania. But basic education funding will remain flat for most schools; much of the excess funding will go into a program called the Ready to Learn Block Grant, which will provide money directly to classroom programs, Cawley said. An additional $20 million of that increase has been earmarked for special education.

"This year we are spending more state tax dollars on public education in this state than we ever had in our history," Cawley said before a crowd of about 50 business and community leaders, including state Reps. Tina Davis, D-141, of Bristol Township, Frank Farry, R-142, of Langhorne, and Gene DiGirolamo, R-18, of Bensalem.

Cawley defended the Ready to Learn grant program against critics, saying that if the money wasn't earmarked for classroom use, most of it would end up going to fund schools' pension obligations instead.

Corbett's budget proposal seeks to help with pensions by postponing some immediate pension payments and reducing benefits for future public employees, which would save the state and school districts about $300 million.

Cawley said pensions could be the biggest issue facing the state's economic future, and said the state could not sustain the "perilous rate" in which costs are increasing.

"If we don't do something, we'll get into a fiscal crisis," he said.

(Crissa Shoemaker DeBree, "Cawley talks education funding, pensions with Lower Bucks chamber," 3/7/14)