Pennsylvania’s budget battle moved to Phoenixville Area Middle School Tuesday with Gov. Tom Wolf touting the benefits of his budget plan and a local Republican state legislator taking aim at Wolf’s claims.

With the state budget impasse now stretching into its fourth week, Wolf said he believes his Democratic administration and the Republican-controlled General Assembly are “making some progress” in trying to reach an agreement.

But if comments made moments after Wolf spoke by state Rep. Warren Kampf, R-157th Dist., are any indication, there’s still a lot of ground to cover before a budget gets adopted.

While Wolf touted what he said would be a 17.89 percent drop in property taxes and a $656,000 increase in basic education funding for the Phoenixville School District under his property tax reform plan, Kampf said the corresponding increase in sales and personal income taxes would result in a net loss of $13 million for district taxpayers.

Wolf said Pennsylvania “is third from the bottom in state support for education” and the time for providing more state support is now.

“While I know that you can’t solve every problem simply by throwing money at it, you can’t keep taking money out of education and get to a good place,” he said. Looking behind him at the newly built Phoenixville Area Middle School, Wolf said, “If we aren’t committed to a future that is based on an investment in education, places like this are going to get rarer and rarer.”

“I’m disappointed that the governor used Phoenixville Middle School as a backdrop while he spoke in platitudes about education without explaining what the actual costs of his massive proposed tax hikes would be on the people of Phoenixville,” Kampf said in a prepared statement distributed to reporters after Wolf was finished speaking.

Kampf was not the only protester.

About five people holding signs protesting those tax policies were on hand as well, including Ed Sweeny, who brought his campaign to join the Tredyffrin-Easttown School Board to the event, making a pitch for pension reform first.

The lines drawn locally mirror the battle lines statewide, which have been drawn along three major fronts — property tax reform, a severance tax on natural gas extracted from the Marcellus Shale formation and, to a lesser extent, pension reform — all of which are tied to public education funding in this year’s budget.

Wolf, who was elected on a platform of providing increased and fairer funding to public schools, has been campaigning almost since he won the election to build public support for his budget.

On Monday, he was in Abington, making his pitch at Willow Hill Elementary School.

He has been aided by teachers unions and groups like Public Citizens for Children and Youth, which helped organize a show of support for those budget priorities last week in front of Pottstown’s Rupert Elementary School.

Republican soldiers have been aided in their efforts by groups like the Commonwealth Foundation, which, like Kampf, issued a detailed rebuttal of Wolf’s talking points.

Also included in Kampf’s comments were quotes from Jim Bruce, a school board member in Tredyffrin-Easttown; Bernard Pettit, a board member from Spring-Ford, and from David Ziev, a Phoenixville board member who was among those who welcomed the governor to the school.

Republicans have characterized the Marcellus Shale tax as dead in the water and called it a “lightning rod” to divert attention from Wolf’s property tax reform plans, which would raise personal income and sales taxes this year to provide property tax relief the following year.

What House Republicans often fail to mention is that House Bill 504, the property tax reform plan they passed but which Kampf voted against, does the same thing — raise personal sales and property taxes this year to fund property tax relief next year.

Stephen Herzenberg, an economist and executive director of the Keystone Research Center who just completed a comparison of the property tax reform plans passed by the House and proposed by Wolf, called the Republican omission “a case of fairly rapid amnesia. I mean thy just voted to raise personal income tax and sales tax.”

Alan Fegley, the superintendent of Phoenixville Schools who introduced Wolf at the podium, said afterward his school board and administration adopted a budget that assumes no additional state funding because they expected a protracted budget fight.

He said while he views property tax reform is essential, he understands that you cannot lower property taxes without raising the money lost in some other way.

The Mercury News – July 28, 2015 – Read article online