State Senate Majority Leader Jake Corman, R-Benner Township, said that in the more than 20 years he has served as a state legislator, he never expected to see times like we are experiencing now.
“These are unprecedented times, clearly,” said Corman, speaking at a recent virtual Chamber of Business and Industry of Centre County event, sharing updates on how measures at the capital impact Centre County. “This is something that we never anticipated. It has been difficult to try and get through it over the last few months.”
Corman said one thing that has been greatly affected at the state level is the budget. The shutdown of the economy due to the coronavirus has led to a shortfall in revenue for the state, with less tax money coming in.
“We went through some extremely difficult times during all of that,” said Corman. “What happened is essentially a shutdown of business in Pennsylvania, and when you shut down business in Pennsylvania, to whatever degree, you are cutting off the revenue to the commonwealth.”
He said there are also more people on “entitlement programs,” such as unemployment, which is a state expenditure. The uncertainly about when things will turn around and what the federal government will do to help leads to concerns about how to prepare and set the budget for the year, and so legislators have held off completing the budget for this fiscal year, which started July 1.
“We had no ability to make that estimate (on the budget) in June because we had no idea how much longer we were going to be shut down,” said Corman. On top of the statewide concerns, Corman said it is also unclear what the next step will be from the federal government, with the next stimulus bill still not passed.
Corman said that the hope is that once the economy is “unleashed again,” it will operate at the level that it was before the pandemic, and, in turn, state revenue will “bounce back fairly quickly.”
“A least that is the hope,” said Corman. But because the federal government can’t reach a compromise on another stimulus bill, Corman said the state “is in a holding pattern.”
In June, the state did pass a five-month budget for operating costs that also included full-year funding for schools and other human services. That leaves until Nov. 30 for the state to get a sense of what the federal government response will be in order to finalize the budget for the rest of the year.
UNEMPLOYMENT CONCERNS
“The PA Department of Labor has had an extremely difficult time as we went from just a couple hundred thousand on the unemployment rolls to a near 2 million,” said Corman.
“As you can imagine, they were ill prepared … to be able to handle such an influx.”
He said his office has heard from many people who “haven’t gotten a cent since March.”
“You can imagine? ‘OK, I am not allowed to work and you are going to send me unemployment compensation, and yet here we are, five months later, still struggling getting money out to the people who are entitled to it,” said Corman.
Corman said he is working to help get the Department of Labor the resources it needs to operate more efficiently and to help people get the help they need.
HOSPITALITY INDUSTRY
Corman said the Big Ten Conference’s decision to postpone the fall sport season will have “a devastating impact on our community in Centre County.”
Because of the impact on the hospitality industry, Corman said he is working to provide small businesses, such as restaurants and hotels, in the area with help via the CARES money the state received from the federal government.
“The economic impact of those seven (Penn State football) weeks of the year are significant for this community,” said Corman. But he praised Penn State for working to have as many students here as possible this fall.
“We are all just trying to make the best of it,” said Corman. “We in the government are trying to get clarity of the governor’s orders and what they mean and what their impact is.”
Ultimately, he said the goal was to get things back to some normalcy as soon as possible and get people back to work and off unemployment. He said, “We are working hard at it.”
He was critical of Gov. Tom Wolf’s most recent decision to limit restaurants to 25 percent capacity and many of the decisions that the administration made concerning the coronavirus response.
“No one anticipated that when Act 47 passed, that the governor could operate under executive powers this long,” said Corman. He said despite tries to limit the Act 47 powers, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the act.
Corman said he wishes the state would allow people to make their own decisions concerning mitigation of the virus.
“I did see recently that, unfortunately, the governor has no immediate plans to change that 25 percent capacity,” said Corman. “Now we may try to run a piece of legislation again to alter that plan and again it will meet with a veto (from the governor), so I don’t have hope. Anytime we go to the court, the court has overruled us.”
While Corman was critical of the governor, he said he understood that these are difficult decisions that Wolf has had to make in unprecedented times. Ultimately, Corman believes that Pennsylvania and its citizens and organizations can make the right choices concerning the coronavirus without mandates from the government.
“I have been kind of hard on the governor and I don’t necessarily mean to be. I am frustrated like everybody else is. I guess I do mean to be in a lot of ways, but there was no manual to this … there is no wise old man in the room. There is no manual for the governor or secretary of health to go to deal with these problems, so they are doing the best that they can. A lot of the information about this virus that started out didn’t turn out to be true. So we are dealing with that,” he said.
“The governor has clearly taken an approach that he is going to err on the side of mitigating the virus and he is going to do everything in his power through his executive order to do that.”
Corman said Wolf’s orders can be difficult to understand and are unclear to people and businesses.
“I think they need to do a better job of trusting the people of Pennsylvania. The Big Ten and Penn State made the decision to not play football this year. That is difficult for all of us, but they made it on their own,” he said.
“They didn’t need a governor or someone else from the government telling them this was the safe way to move forward. We are capable of making these decisions.”
