Corbett finally yields to local lawmakers
Tim Solobay and Rich Kasunic might never have to put a beer on their own tab ever again.
That’s because the two Democratic state senators are going to have a lot of fans across the state after they managed to convince the Corbett administration to not bury VFWs, Legion halls and volunteer fire departments under a pile of red tape.
At least for a year, that is.
Solobay, D-Canonsburg, and Kasunic, D-Dunbar, sent a letter to Gov. Tom Corbett, co-signed by eleven other lawmakers, trying to get the governor to tell the Department of Revenue to postpone the Feb. 1 deadline for organizations to file reports under Act 2, a sweeping revision of the law governing small games.
Corbett’s new Small Games of Chance law, while intended to help these organizations raise more money by upping the prize limits, included untenable reporting requirements that would force charitable, religious, fraternal or veterans’ organizations, clubs, civic and service associations between a rock and a hard place.
With a little less than a month to go before the new reporting rules would have gone into effect, Solobay sent out a press release that the Department of Revenue had issued a one-year reprieve.
(Neither state senator took the opportunity to point out the irony of Corbett’s attempts to regulate the VFWs and VFDs of Pennsylvania into submission while letting the gas industry do whatever it darn well pleases. So, I will.)
Of course, the onerous elements of the Small Games of Chance law has not disappeared, and it’s good to see Kasunic and Solobay saying they won’t stop with just holding off the reporting requirements for the time being. Lawmakers are already working on revisions to the law based on hundreds of letters and emails from community leaders concerned with the overreach of Act 2, according to the release.
“This one-year delay will give the legislature a chance to fix the problems the law has created,” Kasunic said.
Of course, Solobay did get one thinly veiled “I told you so” into his Thursday afternoon release.
“Some of us with experience as volunteers and as organization leaders predicted some of these unintended consequences when the bill was making its way through the legislature,” Solobay said. “But we couldn’t convince everyone of the threat. Now, I think, everyone has heard from leaders in their communities, and we’re ready to make sure that the law preserves the viability of the organizations that desperately need the money to continue the work they do in the community.”
The local lawmakers need not be so shy about who is to blame for this mess. Kasunic and Solobay tried to amend Act 2 into something that wouldn’t be a burden on local organizations back when it was passing through Harrisburg — but they saw those efforts rejected by the GOP lawmakers that control the capital and the governor’s mansion.
It’s high time that Pennsylvanians start holding Republicans accountable for the “work” that the state party is doing with their complete control over state government.
After all, they can’t expect a few Democrats to come around and fix the mess every time.
If you’d like to know his reporting requirements, Brandon Szuminsky can be reached at bszuminsky@heraldstandard.com.