HARRISBURG (TNS) — A bill that would fulfill one of Gov. Josh Shapiro’s major budget requests passed out of the Pennsylvania House Finance Committee on Tuesday on a unanimous vote, albeit after Republicans unsuccessfully tried to strip the bill of the one of its core components.
House Bill 1100 expands the state’s Property Tax and Rent Rebate Program — which provides rebates to housing costs for lower-income seniors and disabled individuals — along the same lines as Shapiro had pitched in his budget proposal earlier this year.
The bill makes significant upward adjustments in the program’s means-testing, raising the income cap from the current $35,000 for homeowners and $15,000 for renters to $45,000 for both.
The bill also raises the maximum rebate amount from $650 per year currently to $1,000, and adjusts the phase-in of that rebate for different income levels.
Shapiro and legislators have said the measure is crucial to stop the decline of the program. The income and benefit levels were last adjusted in 2007, and over time — as seniors have received cost-of-living increases to social security, pensions, and other benefits — fewer and fewer have income low enough to qualify for a benefit that is worth less and less, given inflation.
Data from the PA Department of Revenue show 606,000 Pennsylvanians receiving property tax and rent rebates totaling $282 million in 2009, the program’s peak. As of 2020, that has dropped to $213 million in rebates across 444,000 recipients.
Shapiro estimates the proposed expansion to make another 173,000 Pennsylvanians eligible for the rebate. The cost of this would not hit until the 2024-25 budget year and would be supported by an extra $130 million of gaming revenues transferred to the lottery fund, which pays for many senior citizens’ benefit programs, according to Shapiro’s budget proposal.
Crucially, the expansion envisioned by Shapiro and defined in the bill pegs the program’s benefits to the Consumer Price Index, automatically adjusting them each year for the cost of living and inflation.
During Monday’s meeting, Rep. Keith Greiner of Lancaster County, the committee’s ranking Republican, introduced an amendment stripping the cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) from the bill, calling it “problematic” and expressing concern about the stress the indefinite adjustment may place on the funds that support the program.
Removing this from the bill would keep the cost “more in-line with what the state can deal with,” Greiner said.
But killing the COLA, Democrats said, just invites the same problem as the state has had for the past 16 years.
“If we had adopted a COLA back in 2007 when this was adjusted, the program would’ve kept pace with those modest Social Security increases, those modest pension increases, and people would not have lost out,” said House Finance Committee Chairman Steve Samuelson, D- Northampton County, who sponsored the bill.
Greiner’s amendment failed along party lines. The bill as a whole passed unanimously, with Greiner telling his caucus to vote affirmatively “in order to move the bill forward” for further discussion.
Shapiro visited the West Shore Senior Center earlier this month to rally support for the rebate program’s expansion, telling seniors “you all have paid into the system for a good long while, you deserve the help right now and I want to deliver on that for you as your governor.”
{p class=”krtText”}©2023 Advance Local Media LLC. Visit pennlive.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
{p class=”krtShirttail”}
