The Lead Story: Harrisburg Finally Writes the Check
Pennsylvania’s constitution gives lawmakers one deadline a year: pass a budget by June 30. As we reported July 2 (“You Had One Job”), they blew right past it again, the fifth consecutive late budget. But this year’s delay was mild by recent standards. Gov. Josh Shapiro signed the $50.8 billion budget into law Sunday, July 12, twelve days late, a rounding error compared to last year’s stalemate that dragged well into November and left counties freezing hiring and closing senior centers while they waited on checks that never came on time.
The topline: total spending is up about 1.4% over last year, with no broad-based tax increase. Lawmakers got there partly through real numbers and partly through the kind of accounting maneuver every Harrisburg budget leans on eventually, in this case delaying about $1.3 billion in Medicaid managed-care payments into the next fiscal year. Without that shuffle, the real number is closer to $52.1 billion. The state’s roughly $8 billion Rainy Day Fund stays untouched. Now the details:
State Rep. Tarah Probst, who represents part of Monroe County, confirmed the district-level breakdown: East Stroudsburg Area School District gets a $6 million increase, and Stroudsburg Area School District gets $2.6 million more, both coming through the state’s adequacy and tax-equity formula.
That second number matters if you were tracking our June 29 story, “A Tax Bill That Held the Line.” Stroudsburg’s school board held the line at zero percent this year, a rarity in a region where Easton, Governor Mifflin, and Whitehall-Coplay all raised taxes 3.5 to nearly 5 percent. At the time, we reported the board was banking on roughly a $2.5 million state tax-equity supplement to make that work. The final number came in even higher. For homeowners who watched that vote nervously in June, this is the Harrisburg check that made the flat bill possible, not a one-time fluke.
Back in April, we ran a two-part series on Pennsylvania’s mental health crisis system, “The Keystone State of Mental Health” (April 9) and its follow-up on the state’s severe shortage of staffed psychiatric beds (April 10). We flagged three funding asks moving through Harrisburg at the time: $10 million for the 988 crisis line, $5 million for walk-in stabilization centers, and a $40 million push from county commissioners statewide for permanent, community-level crisis funding.
Here’s how that landed. The 988 line and the walk-in centers got funded as proposed. The county-level ask did not. That $40 million increase, the money that would have gone toward the actual beds and staffing we wrote about in April, was left out of the final deal entirely. Harrisburg funded the phone call. It did not fund where you go after you make it.
We’ve covered Monroe County’s data center fight in multiple stories this year, from the Smithfield Township 180-day pause to Bresnahan’s federal Local Control Protection Act to Sen. Rosemary Brown’s “Residents First” moratorium push to the House votes on HB 2496 and HB 2198 in early July. Given how much ground this saga has already covered, it earns a separate section rather than a paragraph buried here, so look for it in an upcoming edition once we track where HB 2496 and HB 2198 landed in the final deal. Short version for now: the broader data center regulation package Shapiro himself pushed for, limiting tax breaks and setting new transparency standards, did not make it into the final budget. The fight continues into the fall.
Last month, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that skill games, the slot machine look-alikes that have quietly multiplied across Pennsylvania, were illegal gambling devices. That ruling effectively gave lawmakers until October to pass a regulatory and tax framework. Shapiro had proposed taxing them at the same 52% rate as casino slots, which his office estimated could bring in close to $800 million a year. None of that made it into this budget. The devices stay in legal limbo through the fall, and if Harrisburg misses the October deadline, machines currently sitting in local businesses could become subject to seizure and removal once the court's deadline takes effect. Worth watching if you’ve got one humming in the corner of your favorite bar.
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