Chris Satullo: Harrisburg: Is it inept or corrupt?

0 Comments | Philadelphia Inquirer, The, July, 2008 | by Chris Satullo Inquirer Columnist

On a hot day this week in a big building in the imperial city, the chicken and the egg renewed their age-old dispute. The site was the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. The topic was Pennsylvania, the Wisteria Lane of state governments. Here was the day's chicken-or-egg riddle: Why does so little good policy get done in Harrisburg? Is it that Pennsylvania's well-meaning wonks aren't adept at driving a civic agenda? Or is it that, as Shirley Malcom of the Heinz Endowments bluntly put it, "the whole place is so broken, it screws up anything you try to do"? For "broken," read "smugly corrupt." Around the Brookings table sat a skilled array of the state's policy advocates, the nice people who churn out a learned report on, say, affordable housing, then roam the...