Forty-four states approved their budgets on time this year.

Not Pennsylvania.

When Gov. Josh Shapiro finally signed the commonwealth’s $50.1 billion spending plan Nov. 12 — 135 days late, dead last in the nation — it marked the end of a high-stakes negotiating marathon. Playing key roles in the final leg were two of the most powerful politicians in Allegheny and Westmoreland counties.

Republican state Senate President Pro Tempore Kim Ward of Hempfield and her Democratic colleague, Senate minority leader Jay Costa of Forest Hills, were determined to break the stalemate. Their late entrance changed the dynamic of budget negotiations and helped to reinvigorate the stalled talks, according to those in the room.

Democratic state Rep. Matthew Bradford, the House majority leader from Montgomery County, who had been intimately involved in negotiations for months, praised both politicians.

Of Costa, Bradford said, “He was not a bystander. He was instrumental.”

As for Ward, Bradford said she helped make the small group of officials “more cohesive” as they worked out a pact that would affect 13 million Pennsylvanians.

Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman, the Indiana County Republican who along with Bradford helped shepherd the budget to passage, echoed those sentiments.

Adding Ward and Costa to the mix with Shapiro, Pittman and Bradford produced a breakthrough political alchemy that transmuted a stagnant process into a winning formula.

Finger-pointing takes over

Governors here have busted their mid-year deadline to sign the budget 15 times in the past two decades. Only two Pennsylvania budgets in the past 20 years took longer to hammer out than the most recent.

Pennsylvania’s failure to enact timely spending plans with one of the nation’s few full-time legislatures has become something of a punchline and an embarrassment, and with good reason: There was a lot at stake.

More than 1 million Pennsylvanians faced the possibility of losing some or all of the public buses, trains or subways they rode daily, as transit agencies warned of steep service cuts and dramatic fare hikes to address anticipated budget shortfalls.

Two million students were in danger of disruptions to their public schools. Many districts froze budgets or prepped staffers for furloughs.

And everyone in the state risked breathing more polluted air, as some legislators itched to ease restrictions on carbon emissions in the hopes that doing so would spur job growth and aid the economy.

As the budget impasse limped across the 100-day mark, finger-pointing had replaced backroom dealing. Harrisburg was left swollen with partisanship but short on results.

Transit funding loomed

Shapiro pitched his budget in February. Initially, legislators had little to show for their talks. The state’s June 30 budget deadline came and went. Gridlock and doldrums dominated much of Harrisburg’s summer.

Republican leaders said talks degraded after Shapiro provided relief to the state’s major mass transit agencies. In September, the governor let SEPTA (Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority) use $394 million intended for capital improvements to cover operating costs.

Pittsburgh Regional Transit followed soon after, grabbing onto a $107 million lifeline from the governor.

“When transit was set aside, the Democrats, they took their ball and went home,” Pittman said. “I believe when transit fell apart, that’s when a lot of conversations sort of stopped.”

Democrats accused the GOP of disengaging. Nearly 250 days after his budget address, the governor maintained a robust schedule but state senators reported to work just 32 times, Shapiro said in October.

“(Transit funding) did change the dynamic a bit, but we continue to have conversations about transit and transportation funding — even through last week,” Costa told TribLive on Wednesday. “I don’t think it was Democrats who were causing the problems with coming to the table.”

Louis B. Ruediger | TribLive “We were laser-focused on the work in front of us — it’s always critical that we talk with each other and not past each other,” said state Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman, an Indiana County Republican.  

The needle moves

For months, Bradford, Pittman and Shapiro had tried to do the heavy lifting but didn’t get anywhere.

Then, just weeks ago, Ward and Costa, two veteran legislators from southwestern Pennsylvania, rolled up their sleeves.

The needle started to move.

Louis B. Ruediger | TribLive State Sen. Kim Ward, R-Hempfield, the Senate’s president pro tem, provided a game-changing spark to the budget negotiations dynamic.  

Ward, a feisty mother of three and breast-cancer survivor, had earned a reputation as a pragmatist and a deal-closer since being elected to state office in 2008.

A key figure in her party, Ward did not hesitate to butt heads with the Democratic governor.

“Pennsylvanians need leadership at home, not road trips out of state,” Ward posted to X on Oct. 26, listing the public appearances Shapiro logged outside state borders. “End the Shapiro Shutdown.”

Ward’s short stature — she’s 5 feet tall — belied the long reach of her political voice and the depth of her influence in Harrisburg.

She refused to wilt when negotiating in Shapiro’s office on the state Capitol building’s E floor, its long conference table framed by English oak walls detailed with wainscoting.

Those meetings sometimes felt collegial, fueled by the governor’s takeout orders of Yuengling beer and pizza from Ciervo’s, a popular Harrisburg haunt.

One day, the governor’s staff placed Eat’n Park Smiley cookies on each of the legislators’ chairs; the one the staff gave Ward displayed a heart.

Sometimes, though, blood boiled.

In October, the Senate passed a $47.9 billion budget along party lines. Costa, a Pittsburgh-area Democrat from a politically active family who’s served in Harrisburg for 29 years, blasted the GOP plan as “unsustainable.”

“It was a mess,” Costa said. “They did irresponsible things.”

But, legislators told TribLive, Ward and Shapiro managed to put aside their differences.

“Personalities matter. Politics is personal,” said Chris Borick, a political science professor at Muhlenberg College and director of its Institute of Public Opinion. “We’re in an extremely polarized moment in our history. … It’s probably wrong to expect it could have been an easy path right now.”

‘We’ve got to get this done’

Bradford, the House leader, couldn’t ballpark the number of hours he worked the phones over the past nine months or how many conversations he’s had with colleagues in Capitol hallways.

As Labor Day neared, Bradford’s wife had to drive the family’s SUV when they took their eldest son to the University of Mississippi for his freshman year. Bradford spent most of the 16-hour journey juggling phone calls and Zoom meetings on the budget.

Costa, too, worked the phone while commuting, in his case during three-hour drives between his Forest Hills home and Harrisburg. On a few occasions, he made the round trip in one day.

Voter vitriol that flooded the polls during the contentious, 44-day federal shutdown helped prod the statehouse legislators in the right direction.

“That had some psychological impact to push them all toward the negotiating table,” said Borick, the Muhlenberg professor.

In October, with legislators increasingly wary, Shapiro broadened the negotiations from himself, Bradford and Pittman to a five-party gathering that now included Costa and Ward.

Most meetings ran for 60 to 90 minutes, broken up by policy talk among caucus members.

Within days of the five leaders starting to meet, they had hashed out a roughly $50.2 billion preliminary budget, Costa told TribLive.

It didn’t pass muster with the parties’ caucuses, though. They needed to keep cutting.

The Pittsburgh-area contingent was no stranger to brokering deals.

Earlier this year, Ward helped steer talks about Pennsylvania manufacturing while Japan’s Nippon Steel fine-tuned its $14.9 billion takeover of U.S. Steel in the court of public opinion.

Costa, a former appropriations chairman, had crunched budget numbers during governor’s-mansion meetings as far back as the Ed Rendell administration, which ran from 2003 to 2011.

“We had been at this for months, just back and forth — I think there was a recognition of ‘We’ve got to get this done,’ ” Ward said.

Committed to a resolution

As negotiations unfolded, Costa’s optimism grew.

There was no “a-ha moment.” But, by the second or third day, Costa felt conversations tilted more toward being constructive.

“It was clear to me there was a commitment from all the parties to resolve this,” Costa said. “It became clearer and clearer there was a path forward.”

Massoud Hossaini | TribLive State Sen. Jay Costa, the Democratic minority leader from Forest Hills, is credited as playing a key role in hammering out the budget deal.  

Ward agreed.

“I think it was about all the leaders, together, sitting in the same room and sitting at the same table, looking at each other,” Ward said. “I thought that really mattered.”

The budget wrangling drew to a close just eight days after Election Day — not by coincidence, some say.

Strong Democratic Party wins nationwide at the ballot box, which many in the Beltway viewed as a rejection of President Donald Trump’s first year back in office, forced Pennsylvania Republicans to compromise on budget sticking points, Democratic leaders told TribLive.

“There’s nothing like a good old-fashioned political (expletive)-kicking to get politicians focused on what’s important,” Bradford said.

Republicans pushed back on that narrative.

“We were laser-focused on the work in front of us — it’s always critical that we talk with each other and not past each other,” said Pittman.

Mary Isenhour is a former chief of staff for Shapiro’s predecessor, Tom Wolf. She said the political landscape Shapiro is navigating is more fraught than the one faced by her old boss, also a Democrat.

“You have a Democratic governor, a Democratic House and a Republican Senate. That, in itself, is challenging,” said Isenhour. “You add in the other factors, the political climate, and it exacerbates everything. Frankly, I was impressed they got it done by the end of the year.”

Turning the Rubik’s Cube

Shapiro signed the state’s 2025-26 budget Nov. 12. It was $1.4 billion lighter than his original proposal but increased spending by 4.7% from last year.

Before the ink dried on the final fiscal plan, both political parties in one of only two divided legislatures in the U.S. claimed their side the victor.

Many politicians expressed relief a tax hike didn’t accompany the budget. They didn’t agree on much else.

Democrats, who hold a fragile, one-seat majority in the state House, celebrated how the budget earmarked $565 million for K-12 schools.

The GOP, whose majority runs the state Senate, lauded the move to pull Pennsylvania from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which caps carbon emissions.

Both sides touted a new tax credit that, backers say, will provide $193 million in tax relief to more than 900,000 Pennsylvanians.

Ward summed it up with her typical pragmatism: “We didn’t raise taxes. We didn’t raid the rainy-day fund.”

Over the months, an expression Bradford had frequently deployed during more frustrating moments became a kind of Democratic rallying cry.

“We’ve got to keep turning the Rubik’s Cube,” he would say, referring to the cube-shaped puzzle.

Pa. House Democratic Caucus Democratic Rep. Matthew Bradford, the state House Majority Leader, credits top Senate leaders from both parties with finding a way, along with the governor, to break through the budget logjam.  

A Democratic legislator presented Bradford with a keepsake Rubik’s Cube on the day Shapiro signed the budget.

Shapiro’s role

When it comes to delivering budgets on time, Shapiro is batting 0 for 3.

Wolf, a former cabinet-supply company CEO, delivered five of his eight budgets after the June 30 deadline.

In 2015, Wolf negotiated with Republicans holding commanding majorities in both chambers of the General Assembly.

The resulting compromise didn’t go into effect until March of the following year — 267 days late and without the governor’s signature.

Gov. Tom Corbett, a Republican who ran the state from 2011 to 2015, fared better, especially as his party controlled both sides of the legislature.

Three of his four budgets were signed early or on time. Corbett’s one late budget was signed just 10 days late.

Despite his poor track record for budget punctuality, Shapiro’s role in closing the deal was clear and crucial, Democratic Party colleagues said.

“He kept us at the table, negotiating and talking. And that’s how we got to where we are,” Costa said.

“He’s more patient than I ever would be,” Bradford said. “I’m a big supporter of the governor … but he is too kind sometimes.”

Some Republicans heralded supporting players. Pittman cited Bedford County Rep. Jesse Topper, the Republican leader of the House, as essential to cobbling together votes for the final budget.

“He rolled his sleeves up … and, as minority leader in the house, he didn’t have to do that,” Pittman said.

Despite the heady relief about passing the budget, it might be premature to celebrate, some warned.

Shapiro is set to unveil next year’s budget in about 70 days.

“I think we’ll all be at the table very early” in 2026, Ward said. “We needed to have those five-party meetings, and we need to start them earlier next time.”

AP Sen. Kim Ward, R-Hempfield, said getting state government’s top five power brokers together was critical.  

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