the republican governor in pennsylvania you kept the budget every year coming in on time and you haven't seemed to have the opportunity to do that with this individual well you know there's two ways to look at that thing has four times of budget was passed pennsylvania has something in our constitution of line item veto which allows a governor to go through selectively in the budget so i disagree on this i disagree that line  veto authority has existed for half a century fifty years never before do we have a governor veto every line in a budget and in this case seventy five percent of those line items were exactly what he ha exactly and he couldn't even a group himself and that was a problem so it was this awful awful circumstance i hope is never repeated it benefited nobody it caused a lot of stress on our nonprofit community based organizations that help with that oh hell no retardation children and the aging issues all these real people were put in harm's way well it didn't do a lot for school systems either terrible yes right it's hass the buck your way i'm sure i really hope that that mistake is never repeated well one of the things that everybody always wonders when it was our state legislator actually do for us and i have to tell you and tell them because you've never made a big deal out finleyville bridge is your baby well there's many projects anybody who's in the southeastern corner of peter's township is going to be very happy with the new bridge life will be  better there but there are so many road projects over the year the next three or four years it should be about ten to twenty million dollars of state funds invested in improving the roads and peter stone chip that would be wonderful because les said you know whenever i and we were just talking here with the students in sixty eight whenever i went to school here and graduated i hit the same bumps on prom night i think night you know there are car cowpats haven't changed in and we've  more than quadrupled our population it's more than quadrupled right and it's and i use it is really quite sad that the infrastructure have not kept up with what we're doing and i know that once again going back to the republican governor that the the bit the bullet and increase of the gas tax right so we would in which i know maybe some more money nobody's keen on ever increasing taxes but the time comes that we need to invest in the roads and there's no doubt about that but we're investing a bit smarter now like the national bridges one of a new approach to building bridges in the old days every single bridge and the an engineer would come out and survey and build it from scratch design it from scratch now they've come to understand that if you've got a fifty foot gap or one hundred foot gap chances are a fifty foot gap to fill or a hundred foot gap to fill as much to say now i'm  sure there are there are architects and engineers out there who will say not quite and they're right but for the most part so what's what's undertaken now is a project where the private sector is getting about building these saying this was perhaps the best bridge project they've ever experienced and you know i thought to myself well that's good evidence that letting letting people know how to build bridges get about building bridges is a good thing it was funny because whenever i work for  procedures companies were heavy highway construction building bridges and all that and we had a bridge construction project in chicago it was a bascule bridge that railroads went over and because chicago is such a link we had seventy two hours to tear down and replace it bascule bridge and have real road traffic running on wow and so whenever they did that it was i mean lay said sometimes you see these local bridges taking you know five and six and seven months or even longer longer and then several izing we did that in seventy two hours to replace a bad a movable bascule bridge can be yeah it can be done if you have the right people right place well let's talk about some of the things couple of the  areas that are important to of course are taxpayers here seeing that our taxpayers pay seventy percent of our school budget is what's going to happen to the pensions we have a real problem with actions part of the reason that we have a problem is that really the underlying reasons benson supreme court some years ago reached a decision that although in the private sector in the real world even in the federal government that future service the work you're to do next month next year ten years down the road you can adjust what benefits are for what people will do in the future certainly promises made must be promises kept in the work that's done today is got to be compensated just as it was described but the world has moved from a defined concept to benefit plans like the state has to defined contribution plans for a couple of reasons one is a certainty for the employer that they know exactly how much is going to cost but secondly this the younger generation is far more mobile going from job to job to job currently if somebody works with the state they don't earn a penny a pension until they've been there ten years if they leave after nine years eleven months and twenty nine days they walk out with no pension benefit whatsoever whereas if we had a four hundred one k plans like they have in the real world those folks who work there for less than ten years can pack up their four one k and take it with them the taxpayers would have certain ty the employees would have portability and i really think it's time for benson to get modern but the problem is our courts say you can't that if somebody is hired today the courts have said for the entirety of their working career let's say thirty years and the entirety of their retirement which may be another twenty or thirty years the next fifty sixty years it's got to be the same plan so when we were saying well we observe that well this kind of plan is old fashioned outmoded time to move on the problem is we can't fully move on for fifty or sixty years i believe that the public understands that that doesn't make a lot of sense and if the supreme court has believes they find in our state constitution some right that for future service you cannot diminish anybody's or change anybody's pension deal i think it's time for questions will my mouth question and i am fairly confident  eighty percent of the public would say yes let's modernize pennsylvania well let me ask you a question the judges also under the same system they are now said there are many that that have that belief that this this right that they've discovered in the constitution maybe they're a little too close to the question well another thing with the pensions nolen not dealing with the state pensions as much as the change that has happened in the pension program if you will for a one and if i understand it correctly in the you're much more skewed to this than i am that if your pension is sitting dormant now somewhere that you used to have seven say you have a savings account you haven't done anything with and in many years originally these laws were to protect the public even on cash checks maybe you didn't notice it in your mail it looks like junk mail went in the trash after a number of years that property has to be turned over to the state and everything go online and you can get there through my website which i know they got on the scroll you can go and search for your home address addresses you still live that by your last name and you can see the states holding any of your property that was turned over but it has been inviolate that pensions or off limits for good reason we tell people put it away and forget it right what's your advice to young people put away money very tired and forget it it will be there well not anymore in pennsylvania one of the worst worst laws that's been adopted i opposed it i'm looking to repeal it but right now people need to be aware you have to have contact with your institution at least once every three years or there are blinds now to turn that over the state and this has to affect number one earning so you're putting out a way in forgetting it if you're in your twenty's and thirty five years from now maybe recover whatever got turned over but all the earnings in the meantime you've got the second thing is under the i is treated as an early distribution so you're actually subject to attacks analysts say you could be tax on money vergara you had in the state say so uses your property and you get a tax tell you from the i r s it's the worst  idea ever and i'm aiming to see it repealed i'm glad there's suddenly been some media attention on this because in the spring when this happened i was talking to newspapers they go oh this is all too complicated we can't bother with that and now people are understanding it's not that complicated this property belongs to people put it away for long term and they deserve that that property will be there long term well that's  try to bring up issues and you of course have one of the larger accounting firms that why i'm not with the firm anymore oh no no no i stepped away from oh ok i'm practicing as a c p a i'm very proud of the firm but i stepped away from practice certainly after i became a legislator because this really is a full time job often folks say well you know the legislature is only in session seventy one hundred days a year i would draw t parallels one when we watch the steelers on sunday game day nobody says all those dealers only work sixteen hours a year they're sixteen games are each an hour sixteen hours nobody's under that impression or for students when you come to turn in your term paper or if you have to make a presentation to the class you might say oh well you only only did five minutes of work no no no no most of the work comes outside of the session because the goal is to take these issues sort them out be reasonable responsible be accountable figure out a solution and when you come into session it's really just putting the ribbon on it well again and i said i'm like what anybody has been told to our local me the newspaper there has been no voice on putting a school on that property that's for the future you know we have a plan con os to in fact project a building on there so they could prove yes that will fit that building and you have so much property and we have because this is the largest facility we have we have projected what it would take to build a high school on that property that's as far we've never voted on anything now the problem is of course the plan khan has approved give me a fifty five acre parcel that we could go to school and parking lot and everything on so after meeting all of their requirements now it's come down to the idea that if we in fact as a community do vote to put a building on that property we will be facing the same question that everybody else is facing the have built schools in the state over the last few years is plan con workable is a doable and our schools are going to be able to look forward to some kind of reimbursement as time goes on you but that's is a very astute plank on is the state oversight for construction of schools and the deal had always bet that if you jump through all these hoops with the state and there's loads of them frankly way too many i believe in local control more than the people flying desks and harrisburg but if a local school district jumps through all these hoops they will receive some reimbursement significant reimbursement for the cost of the building that's always been the proposition at this point time governor was opposed allowing funding and making the past promises because there schools have been built based upon assure that are due for reimbursement and we battled embattled this year we finally were able to get some funding put it to catch up with the old promises but whether it was a good idea a bad idea i believe that when somebody makes a promise they've got to keep their work in the states made promises to school districts all across the state and then to keep the word it needs to reimburse folks who played by the rules now the odd thing is even though new construction doesn't carry up actual promise that there will be money at the other side of the rainbow you're still required to jump through the same hoops r as if you are now my guess is that over time it will get sorted out but it's it's just a terrible way to do business when we have a number of school districts in our area with a park my leavening short changed right and there you know the community was told ok if you spend this much money you can project a reimburse grant over this and you know that's certainly benefits that certainly benefits the school system and the taxpayers especially in peter's time whenever the burden of education for these students are on our taxpayers at seventy percent right as versus some of the others who i mean i said whenever the state divvied out their reimbursements last december  some of the school this was got three in four thousand dollars peter time she got five hundred something yeah and that was like i said that demonstrates how much the state pays towards our our students versus all of these other students so i mean we've done a good job educating on the backs of our citizens but on the other hand we owe it to our citizens to go through jump through those hoops right at the time to make sure that we have done everything possible to make sure that we are in a position to in fact meet all the requirements a process and it's expensive very expensive once again for the for the school district to get through all of these thing and i'm not sure a lot of wisdom comes out of the experience i it's all mostly checking boxes or making money for somebody well and that's that's the other thing i don't mind everybody making a profit if it comes commonsensical lead to a conclusion but whenever you're just reiterating constantly everything it just gets crazy we only have a little which is a great example of the cost of regulation actually that the process of building a school peters township has a lot of bright people and i believe that here is ten to school district if it decided it wanted to build a school that it has the brains to hire architects hire engineers hire construction companies build the school they want this oversight for harrisburg i don't think adds a lot of value to the proposition but it's a very expensive and time consuming process and so we have these regulations that ultimately come to bear on the backs of the taxpayer because when the school district has to pay for all this i mean our neighbors the residents have to pay for all the benefits the community gets just like washington county peter santa pays the majority of washing county's taxes we don't get a lot of benefit from it washington i found a lot of people in peter's township don't realize that peters is the most populous community in all washington county and for some reason folks and peter seem to think maybe it's a little washington or one of these other towns but it peters township it is the largest community in all washing county yeah  bridge project because the people see that they in fact are receiving some benefit from from their tax dollars going as one of the reasons i like the fact that with the gaming taxes a chunk of that stays right here in washington county to be distributed as well as a local share count taxes because the history is when we mail money to iras part it's very difficult to drag back home right and i work on that all the time but it's very difficult i'd rather see the money stay at home and let our neighbors figure out what's the best use of that money rather than going in panhandling in the halls harrisburg well john we are in the last couple minutes of the program and it's always too fast and it's on and we always have like eight hundred topics that we could talk about for hours you're up for election again i am ok and so i want to you have about a minute left please explain to the folks why they should be voting for never expected to run for office back when i was happily pursuing my career as a c p a we touched on that and it is very interesting because a c p a certified public accountant the reason the word public is in there is that have got a duty to the public that if they're going to be associated with some presentation that the public needs bill to realign it they must be able to tell the truth to the public or you can lose your license and i went from that approach the world to being government where nobody gets penalized apparently when they don't tell the truth it's it was a bit unsettling but i have made it my career determination to undertake impossible things that will have a benefit that indoors long after i'm gone and change the way government operates forever the open records law opening up to the public all sorts of state documents that could never be seen before that we had no laws at all about lobbyist we were the wild wild west shamefully the only statement nation now we have a lobbying law doing these things that once you turn on the light can never turn them back off again and again and i think there's no mistake that we've had dozens and dozens of legislators and judges and state officials go to present since these bills are become law because the public can now discover when people are up to no good and we we need to expunge corruption and that's i'm very i got some unfinished business i want to finish that business and that's why i hope the people  that well john i certainly hope i see you again here as our state legislator and look forward to expanding on some other topics thank you very much bill thank you so much for coming all right once again i think thank everyone for joining us today and this is talking politics in western pennsylvania our guest today has been john maher thank you so much