HARRISBURG (AP) - An agreement on a nearly $27.7 billion budget deal announced Wednesday evening by Gov. Tom Corbett and top Republican state lawmakers appears to be nearly identical to what lawmakers had proposed several weeks earlier.
It also includes a meeting of the minds on legislation to create a tax credit sought by Corbett in his pursuit of bringing an integrated petrochemical industry to Pennsylvania, anchored by a multibillion-dollar refinery planned in the Pittsburgh area by a subsidiary of Netherlands-based oil and gas giant Royal Dutch Shell PLC.
The agreement for the fiscal year beginning July 1 came after two weeks of almost-daily talks behind closed doors and at a time when schools are making plans to lay off thousands of employees, in part because of cuts in state aid this year. Corbett, a Republican who took office last year after campaigning on a pledge not to raise taxes, and the others would not give details about their new agreement until rank-and-file lawmakers are briefed in the coming days.
"We have agreement among ourselves on many, many areas," Corbett told reporters gathered in his Capitol offices. "There are still some other areas we need to work out."
The budget, which typically involves the passage of a couple dozen pieces of legislation, will still require approval by the full House and Senate to go into effect.
Democrats were not invited to the talks, and not one single Democratic lawmaker voted for the current budget, which is Corbett's first as governor.
The newly agreed-upon spending plan appears to be nearly identical to one proposed by lawmakers. If so, it will include no new taxes while raising spending less than 2 percent and leaving about $267 million in reserve a year from now.
Meanwhile, it would cut business taxes by $275 million while slashing money for county-run social services by 10 percent, or $84 million. Aid for public schools and 18 state-supported universities would remain flat, while the state would eliminate a $150 million cash benefit called General Assistance for temporarily disabled adults who are out of work.
The welfare cash benefit, which dates back to the Great Depression, has been on Republicans' chopping block despite appeals from advocates for the poor and homeless, as well as the AARP, the United Way and religious groups representing Catholics, Methodists, Lutherans, Unitarian Universalists and Jews.
Corbett proposed a $27.1 billion hold-the-line plan in February that nonetheless included deep cuts in aid for education and social services while cutting business taxes and spending more on health care and public employee pension costs.
But tax collections began to brighten after that, and Republican lawmakers used the newly available cash in their alternative plan to add hundreds of millions of dollars to the subsidies that Corbett had proposed for universities, public schools, county-run social services, the race horse industry, medical research, retailers and hospitals and nursing homes that care for the poor.
The Democratic minority in the House of Representatives sought unsuccessfully earlier this month to win a vote for $300 million in additional spending that it insisted the state would collect in taxes and bashed the GOP agenda as needlessly painful for schools and people who depend on social services.
