September 24th, 2009

Reports the Philadelphia Inquirer:

In the days since legislative leaders and Gov. Rendell announced they had struck a long-overdue state budget deal, aides have been toiling behind the scenes in the painstaking process of finalizing voluminous details.

The nuts and bolts are spread out over more than a dozen bills, from a tax code to a welfare code.

“Very little is 100 percent, locked-in-stone at this point,” Erik Arneson, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi (R., Delaware), said yesterday. “A lot of it is going through hundreds of pages of documents line by line. A lot of staff have rulers that they slide down the pages to make sure every comma, every letter, every dollar is correct.”

Or, as Johnna A. Pro, press secretary to House Appropriations Chairman Dwight Evans (D., Phila.), put it, “It ain’t sexy.”

“It’s tedious, mind-numbing work that will make you go cross-eyed,” she said. “But it’s necessary.”

The package – announced Friday night, 80 days late – calls for roughly $28 billion in spending for the fiscal year that began July 1. The deal calls for increased business and cigarette taxes and legalization of table games at the state’s slot machine parlors.

Senate President Pro Tempore Joe Scarnati (R., Jefferson) said top legislators were still negotiating details of two budget-related bills – to legalize poker, blackjack, and other table games at slot parlors, and to tax the profits from small games of chance at social clubs and the like.

“There are a lot of things out there that need to be reconciled,” Scarnati said.

Dare to read more?  Do so at the Inquirer.