Critics begged to differ. "It's stunningly terrible," said Carey Morgan, who heads the Greater Philadelphia Coalition Against Hunger. "I don't think our legislators have their priorities in order. . . . This budget ignores real people."
Overall, the $27.15 billion budget deal is about 3 percent less than the current year's budget. It lets Gov. Corbett stick to his campaign pledge not to raise taxes - including no new levy on extraction of natural gas from the Marcellus Shale - and sharply rein in spending.
But it comes at a cost.
Although the negotiated budget deal restores some money to public schools and state-supported universities, they are still taking hefty financial hits.
The four state-related universities - Temple, Lincoln, Pennsylvania State, and Pittsburgh - faced more than a 50 percent cut in aid under Corbett's original proposal. GOP negotiators put back millions of dollars, and those schools are now looking at a 19 percent cut - although that, too, was in jeopardy Monday night after some of the relevant bills failed to muster enough votes in either the House or Senate.
Those bills, which would allow state money to flow to the universities, needed to be approved by a two-thirds vote. But many Democrats, who are in the minority in both chambers, said they could not vote for such steep cuts.
Rep. Bill Adolph Jr. (R., Delaware) said Monday night that the funding bills for the universities would likely get pushed to the fall.
Public schools
In K-to-12 public education, the negotiated budget would restore about $269 million, or almost a quarter, of the $1.1 billion in cuts that Corbett had proposed.
