Pa. officials fly high in state plane on taxpayers’ dime

Gov. Tom Wolf appeared in Allentown one day last fall to celebrate his success in boosting early education funding. An hour later he was at a news conference 90 miles away in Steelton, touting free breakfasts for students.

Despite the distance, no speed limits were broken. Wolf winged it from the northeast to south-central Pa. aboard the taxpayer-provided plane that is at the disposal of the governor and other state officials.

Since taking office in 2015, Wolf has averaged more than one flight per week on the nine-seat, twin-turboprop King Air 350i, racking up 256 flights at a total cost of nearly $642,000.

His annual plane use is generally on par or far less than that of his predecessors, although covid-19 reduced air travel to just five flights in 2020.

It has picked up since. Last year, he made 20 trips on the state plane and this year took 38 trips.

“You can get to a lot more places, see a lot more people, do a lot more events if you can get there faster,” Wolf said. “The plane allowed me to do that. I’m not sure how you do a cost-benefit analysis of that but I think the benefits outweigh the costs there.”

Republican lawmakers agree that in a state the size of Pennsylvania it makes sense for the chief executive working in the Capitol to have access to a plane. After all, as Sen. Dave Argall, R-Schuylkill County, put it, “it’s a long way to Erie.”

Wolf can attest to that from his days as Gov. Ed Rendell’s revenue secretary in 2007-2008 when he didn’t have access to the plane.

“That was the policy of that administration, so I drove everywhere,” Wolf said. “It takes a long time to drive to Pittsburgh or Erie from here.”

Wolf’s spokeswoman said flying allows the governor to quickly respond to emergency situations around the state and gives him the opportunity to visit areas that typically don’t receive a lot of attention, while still being able to get to back to Harrisburg to attend to business in the Capitol.

Wolf allows his Cabinet officers to use the plane, which is flown by a state pilot, but they pay for it out of their departmental budgets.

When it comes to using the plane to fly to political events, the longstanding practice has been that campaigns reimburse the state.

Rendell, for example, used campaign funds to reimburse the state for 42 flights that involved campaign business in 2005 and 2006.

Wolf has never used the plane expressly to travel to political events, said his spokeswoman, Beth Rementer.

“The governor only uses the state plane for government business, but if political activity occurs during that period, the governor’s office bills the campaign for that portion of the travel,” she said.

Mixing the two uses of the plane has raised questions from Capitol observers in the past who ask whether a government-related business trip is a pretext for traveling to a destination for the campaign event.

The state of Ohio, for instance, avoids that situation by limiting the use of its state aircraft to official state business only, said Matt Bruning, a spokesman for the Ohio Department of Transportation.

Here are fast facts about the Pennsylvania state plane and its use:

• All flights since the beginning of 2021 are listed as taken for business purposes. Prior to that, a trip’s purpose was listed as “meeting” or “maintenance.” A 2012 state law requires “at minimum” certain information to be included in the publicly accessible flight logs which are supposed to be — but not always — updated monthly. Rementer said Wolf’s public schedule, advisories and news releases fill in the gaps to adhere to his Wolf’s “commitment to transparency.”
• State flight logs show 2017 was Wolf’s highest single-year use of the plane when he took 49 trips, one more than the highest single-year use by his predecessor, Tom Corbett.
• High flying Gov. Tom Ridge took the most flights with 196 in 1998, when the state had two planes available for officials’ use. Gov. Rendell averaged 56 trips in his first term in office. Compare that to the comparably sized state of Ohio, where Gov. Mike DeWine has taken just 64 flights on the state plane since taking office in 2019.
• While most of Gov. Wolf’s travel was in-state, flight records show 19 trips to locations outside of Pennsylvania. In March 2022, Wolf flew to Washington, D.C., for a St. Patrick’s day event at the White House attended by other governors. In October, he flew to Boston to speak at his alma mater, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, about manufacturing initiatives and his experiences as governor. Rementer justified the trip because he “spoke in his official capacity.” Also in October, he flew to West Virginia to attend an Appalachian Region Commission conference.
• The number of flights Wolf took over the past eight years was second only to the number of flights by PennDOT officials, a smattering of them for maintenance but more for official business.
• The third highest frequent user was the Office of Attorney General, which as of Nov. 27, used it 62 times since 2017. In the six years prior to Attorney General Josh Shapiro taking office in 2017, flight logs show the office did not use the state plane.
• Some Capitol observers question one flight that mixed state and campaign business. One of the flights charged $2,816.10 to the attorney general’s office for a Feb. 10 trip where Shapiro and three of his staffers went to Pittsburgh to announce the success of a partnership the attorney general’s office had combatting regional crime. Later that day, candidate Shapiro had a gubernatorial campaign event and posted photos from it on Twitter. Because campaign activity was part of the trip, Shapiro’s campaign spokesman Manuel Bonder said the campaign paid for Shapiro to travel home using an alternative mode of travel. Mixing the official government business trip with a campaign event may have been convenient for Shapiro’s schedule but sticking taxpayers with the full cost of the flight prompted government reform activist Eric Epstein of RocktheCapital to question Shapiro’s judgment in this instance. “The optics are awful,” he said.
• Maintaining the state plane carries an annual cost of $100,000 to $115,000 and leasing hangar space at Capital City Airport adds another $105,000 to the annual tab. According to PennDOT, it is more cost-effective to own the plane than to charter individual flights, which it estimated at double the cost.