In the weeks leading up to the Governor's budget address, the Wolf administration continues to make efforts to address the fiscal challenges facing the state budget. As of December 2016, overall state revenues were below estimate by $367 million and the Office of the Budget estimated a $603 million general fund shortfall for FY 2016-2017 during its mid-year budget briefing, with the deficit for FY 2017-2018 projected to be around $1.75 billion.

In recent weeks, the Department of Corrections announced plans to close two state prisons and reduce by half the community corrections population by June 30, 2017. As of this writing, five prisons across the state are reported to be under consideration for the closures, and the decision is expected to be announced by the end of January.

Additionally, Gov. Wolf and then-Treasurer Timothy Reese announced the transfer and consolidation of three investment funds, moving the investment management of the State Workers' Insurance Fund, Workers' Compensation Security Fund, and Underground Storage Tank Indemnification Fund to the Department of Treasury, with the concurrent elimination of private management fees. The state has also announced the closing of two residential mental health facilities, including the Hamburg State Center and the civil confinement wing of the Norristown State Hospital (some of the space in the Norristown facility to be reused to add more forensic evaluation space for patients who are committed through the criminal justice system). Altogether, these efforts are estimated to save between $200 and $300 million in this and future fiscal years.

Gov. Wolf previously said that he does not plan to propose raising sales or income taxes in his budget proposal. However, recent media reports indicate he will again propose a natural gas severance tax, although no details have been released. Counties have advocated that regardless of any severance tax proposal the state may consider, the current impact fee rate and distribution to local governments under Act 13 must be maintained.

Governor Wolf is scheduled to present his budget proposal for FY 2017-2018 in an address to the House and Senate on Feb. 7 at 11 a.m. Details and analysis will be provided on CCAP's Budget News and Updates web page.

On Jan. 12, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) released a second Advanced Notice of Proposed Rule Making (ANPRM) on its disaster deductible proposal, which would require recipients of FEMA Public Assistance funds to meet a predetermined level of financial or other commitment before receiving federal disaster funds. While states are typically the recipients of these funds, counties are often sub-recipients.

The original proposal was put forward in early 2016 to solicit comments on a disaster deductible framework, under which states could meet the deductible requirement not just through their post-disaster spending, but also through investments in certain resilience and mitigation projects, like prior adoption of a building code that reduces risk, adoption of proactive fiscal planning such as establishing a disaster relief fund or a self-insurance fund, or investment in programs of assistance available when there is not a federal declaration. FEMA noted that it put forth the concept in response to recommendations from the Government Accountability Office and the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General that federal spending on disasters should be reduced. FEMA views the deductible as a way to incentivize mitigation, which it considers a more equitable means of reducing federal spending than increasing the thresholds of eligibility for federal disaster funds.

More than 100 different entities responded to last year's proposal; NACo and several other state and local organizations in Washington D.C. expressed strong concerns about its potential for shifting costs of disaster recovery from the federal government to the state and local level. FEMA is now offering the second ANPRM in an effort to offer the public a more detailed deductible concept upon which to provide additional feedback. The ANPRM can be viewed at www.federalregister.gov by searching for document number 2017-00467. The deadline for submitting comments is April 12, 2017.

The state's Office of Open Records recently made a final determination  on an appeal involving a request for information on a school district's tax duplicates, in particular the home addresses of certain individuals.

The appeal involved a right-to-know request made of the Boyertown Area School District, part of which sought copies of the most recently generated tax duplicate in the possession of the District. The District provided the requester with redacted copies of the records, removing home addresses and tax parcel ID numbers, and citing the Pennsylvania Supreme Court's decision  in Pennsylvania State Education Association v Commonwealth in October 2016 that held an individual possesses a right to privacy in certain types of personal information, including his or her home address, as the reason for redaction.

On appeal to the Office of Open Records, the requester argued that the tax duplicate is made public by the Consolidated County Assessment Law (CCAL), but the Office indicated that, while the CCAL requires counties to make the complete assessment roll available to the public for inspection, it does not impose a similar requirement on individual taxing districts that receive a tax duplicate from the county. Since the request was made to the school district, the District permissibly redacted the home addresses from the tax duplicate in accordance with the PSEA decision. At the same time, the Office determined that the District could not redact tax parcel ID numbers, because they are attributable to a piece of property rather than an individual, and thus the right to privacy does not apply.