Maher reflects on 20-year career in state House
Regarding his counterparts in Harrisburg, state Rep. John Maher has an alarming statistic: “We’re nearing 40 members of the Legislature becoming incarcerated since I’ve been there.”
It’s been 20 years since the Republican from Upper St. Clair took office following the midterm death of his predecessor, Al Pettit. So that averages out to a pair of senators and/or representatives heading to prison for each year of Maher’s political career, including some especially high-profile people.
”We had the ridiculous sad-but-true moment when two former speakers of the House, one Republican and one Democrat, actually shared a cell,” he said about John Perzel and Bill DeWeese, respectively, following their corruption convictions.
Maher, whose 40th District also includes Peters Township and part of Bethel Park, reflected on the past two decades as guest speaker at a recent McMurray Rotary Club meeting.
A certified public accountant and founder of Maher Duessel, a Pittsburgh firm that specializes in nonprofit and governmental accounting and auditing, Maher hadn’t considered running for public office until Petit’s seat opened.
“There were people in the community who encouraged me to think about it, and my answer immediately was no,” he recalled. “No way. I’m not a politician. I don’t like politics.
But Maher thought his financial background could be helpful in Harrisburg, so he decided to step forward to serve. And with his auditing experience, he had a particular interest in updating the state’s open records law to force a greater degree of transparency.
“That law dated back to era when there weren’t even photocopiers, and carbon paper was not everywhere, either,” he explained. “So if somebody wanted a copy of a government record, some clerk had to sit down and pound it out on a typewriter, page by page.”
As such, obstacles existed to filling certain requests.
“Certainly, once we were in the electronic age,” Maher said, “there was no reason at all that these documents shouldn’t be public, except for one: that the people in the government liked that fact that people couldn’t come take a peek at anything they didn’t choose to turn over.”
Maher credited Bill Northrop Sr., retired Observer Publishing Co. vice president, with helping him pursue getting the law changed.
“He had been working on it for decades, and in my first full term, I managed to make it happen,” Maher said. “And when I look back, I have no idea how I succeeded.”
Fast-forward to 2017, and he gave an example of a recent situation involving the supply of “summer gas,” a seasonal blend of gasoline that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency requires for southwestern Pennsylvania. Ninety percent of the supply, Maher explained, comes from refiners in the eastern part of the state.
“There is one pipeline that carries that gasoline from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. This pipeline has been there for about 60 years, and the folks that now own it want to change the direction of the flow,” he said. “If that succeeds, 90 percent of our supply of summer gas is gone.”
Maher learned that the application to reverse the flow had been filed with the state Public Utility Commission, and he requested a full review.
“The PUC agreed to proceed with putting through an administrative law judge and having a full hearing on this,” he explained. “I don’t know how that’s going to turn out, but if it hadn’t caught my eye, this summer we would have a really, really difficult situation.”
Maher also expressed his opposition to proposals that have come through the House and Senate to shift the burden of paying for public education away from property taxes to a combination of other taxes collected by the state for distribution.
“Now, you don’t have to be too engaged in Pennsylvania government to understand that when your tax dollars travel east on the Turnpike to Harrisburg, not too many of them succeed in making the return trip,” he said. “And the notion to being beholden to the wisdom of whoever may be there in the future to determine the resources to be invested in public education locally is very frightening to me.”