PA Gov. Tom Wolf calls Republican budget ‘garbage’

“They need to do their jobs”.

Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf isn’t saying yet what he’ll do with the budget bill on his desk as a state government impasse threatens to enter its seventh month.

It contains about $500 million less than the package that Wolf had supported, would carry a smaller tax increase to prop it up and sends substantially less aid to public schools and social services than what Wolf had sought.

“Apparently a $30.3 billion budget that increases education spending by over $400 million without sales or income tax increases is just not enough”, Reed said in a statement.

Wolf also reduced House and Senate budgets back to 2014-2015 funding levels.

The announcement, made during a news conference, is the latest in the ongoing budget battle in Harrisburg.

The governor implored lawmakers to return to Harrisburg and “get back to work…” “I get that people are exhausted of this stalemate, but we were nearly there”.

Republicans called that a bogus statement because they planned to borrow almost $3 billion to pay to school districts for money that the state promised to pay them for past and current school construction projects.

Members of legislative leadership reported no progress over the weekend in efforts to revive a bipartisan compromise budget after it stalled last week. He specifically cited what he says is a $95 million cut in funding for education.

Governor Tom Wolf is calling legislators back to Harrisburg.

“At the same time, I’m allowing emergency funding for our schools to get out”. He will, however, allow emergency state funding to go to school districts, counties and social services. “But this is on an emergency basis only”.

“I want to see the implementation of the full budget agreement that we had in place”, Costa said.

Wolf said the fact that the new proposal was so drastically different from the compromised budget proposal was “doubly frustrating”.

“This budget is wrong for many reasons, but especially because it does not balance, increases our deficit and fails to invest in our schools and our future”.

Pennsylvania Budget Secretary Randy Albright said Wolf hopes to see $350 million in basic educational funding, $50 million for special educational funding and $10 million more for the state Head Start program. Wolf’s workplace stated it didn’t anticipate a choice before Monday., & the governor has choices.