Influencing how Pa. spends $1B in opioid money

"The great thing about this [program] is the state is encouraging the conversation.”

—John Brenner, of the Pennsylvania Municipal League, on a state program that was created to encourage collaboration across municipal boundaries 

In a February memo to university leaders, Penn State President Neeli Bendapudi wrote that last year university leaders “brought forward a $245 million deficit budget, which the Board of Trustees would not support.”

Yet, a review of agendas and meeting minutes for the full board and its finance committee reveals no record of the board receiving a budget proposal with a $245 million deficit. Bendapudi began as the university’s president in May 2022.

In a statement to Spotlight PA, Penn State wrote: “In spring 2022, university leadership talked with board leadership and shared their progress on the budget that would be presented at the July 2022 board meeting. During those conversations, board leadership suggested that such a large deficit would likely not be supported by the board if presented to them or taken for a vote.”

Months later, the board adopted an operating budget with a $149 million deficit in the university’s general fund.

Pennsylvania’s open meetings law requires that public agencies, including the boards of state-related universities, only deliberate and take official actions in meetings open to the public. Penn State’s trustees have previously faced questions about their interpretation of an exception to the law, specifically that the board’s executive committee held regular private meetings for more than a decade to plan and review agendas.

Penn State’s trustees may have violated the Sunshine Act if a majority of the voting members of the full board or a similar majority of committee members were present for the spring 2022 conversation, in which case a public meeting could have been necessary, said Melissa Melewsky, media law counsel for the Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association, of which Spotlight PA is a member.

If a quorum was not present, Melewsky said, a conversation between trustees and university leadership could still run afoul of the spirit of the Sunshine Act, specifically the public’s right to see an agency deliberate its business.

“The vast majority of agency business, like a discussion of a budget, should happen in a public meeting,” she told Spotlight PA.

Shannon Harvey, board secretary and director of the Office of the Board of Trustees, defended the board’s actions in an email to Spotlight PA. 

“The Sunshine Law does not restrict discussions between board leadership, board committee leadership and the university administration,” Harvey wrote. “The board does not take any official action outside of pre-arranged public board meetings at which a quorum is present. We believe that our conferences, executive sessions and public meetings are structured to comply with the law.”

Penn State’s budget deficit — within Penn State’s roughly $3 billion general funds budget and which Bendapudi has characterized as “structural” — led to cuts across the university, an ongoing “strategic hiring freeze,” and likely layoffs. —Wyatt Massey, Spotlight PA

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