Tom Wolf Faces Big Decisions on Budget, Policies

Democrat Tom Wolf had to make high-pressure decisions while running a business, serving as state revenue secretary and successfully campaigning for governor. But nothing compares to what awaits him in January after he is sworn in as Pennsylvania's chief executive.

There won't be much time to break in -- the 2015-16 budget address must be delivered in February or March, and he'll need to find a way to work with strong Republican majorities in the Legislature to plug yet another budget deficit projected by the Independent Fiscal Office to be almost $2 billion.

Wolf will have to determine a strategy to fill two vacancies on the Supreme Court, what to make of the ongoing work of a school funding commission, how to pursue a death penalty moratorium he has advocated and even whether some of his top aides should be voting members of the Penn State board.

Wolf's aides say no one should be surprised at his main priorities -- Medicaid expansion, education funding and a tax on natural gas extraction.

"You will hear a consistent drumbeat from the governor-elect on the absolute imperative of doing what's fair and right and putting a reasonable severance tax in place," Wolf's chief of staff Katie McGinty said.

Personnel decisions will require much of his attention at first. He and his lieutenants will have to decide who stays, who goes and who they want to bring into the government. Some major state agencies have been without a permanent leader for some time -- Education and Environmental Protection among them -- and Wolf will have to decide whom he wants to nominate and persuade the Senate to confirm them.

"He's working as hard and fast as he can to have that team in place" by the Jan. 20 inauguration, McGinty said. "Whether every single member of the Cabinet will be identified and announced, I don't know, but all I can tell you is all day, every day, he's working toward that end."

Then there is the element of the unknown, the surprises that can crop up in the first year for Pennsylvania governors.

One day after Republican Gov. Tom Corbett took over from Democrat Ed Rendell four years ago, prosecutors in Philadelphia disclosed horrific practices at an abortion provider in the city, a scandal that illustrated problems with the state's regulation of abortion clinics. Corbett's first year also brought the Jerry Sandusky child molestation case into the open.

That was the case two months after Republican Gov. Dick Thornburgh took office in 1979, when he found himself grappling with a crisis of global proportions at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Harrisburg.

Thornburgh said the nuclear crisis showed him how people acted under intense pressure.

"It was a proving ground, kind of a grapefruit league for people who aspired to positions in the administration," he said. "The other thing was, We got pretty good press out of that, and that helped in cementing our relationship with the rank-and-file voters."

Rendell spent much of 2003 in a stare-down with the Legislature over taxes, gambling and the education budget, and Republican Mark Schweiker was confronted with the 2002 Quecreek mine disaster nine months after he was sworn in to fill the remainder of Tom Ridge's term. Corbett inherited a battered economy and made education funding decisions that were still being debated as he ran for a second term this fall.

"His staff, at least the ones that were on the campaign, will quickly realize that governing is much more difficult than campaigning," said Kevin Harley, Corbett's former press secretary. "Because in the campaign, you can usually control the message and you control a lot of the variables. Once you become governor, there are variables you can't control."