Shapiro’s administration, as well as former executive branch staffers, have argued that the plane connects people with their government officials.
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The four-leg journey cost taxpayers just over $13,000, and was the longest and most expensive of 113 trips that Pennsylvania’s state-owned plane made during Shapiro’s first year in office. But “Pennsylvanians expect their Governor to be out in their communities listening, learning, and delivering — not just sitting behind a desk in Harrisburg,” Shapiro’s spokesperson Manuel Bonder said in a statement, “and that’s why Governor Shapiro has always kept an aggressive and rigorous travel schedule that has taken him to every county in our Commonwealth several times over.
According to PennDOT’s written policy, “use of state aircraft can often be the most economical means of travel, particularly if several senior staff members are traveling more than a 2 1⁄2 hour drive from Harrisburg.” The governor has top priority in booking flights, followed by the lieutenant governor, then statewide elected commonwealth officials, members of the governor’s cabinet and senior staff, board and commission chairs, and legislative leadership — all on a first-come, first-serve basis.
Driving more than halfway across the state would have taken three and a half hours. But Shapiro was able to get from York to Pittsburgh in 40 minutes on the plane, according to flight records. “In my experience, Pennsylvanians want to see their elected leaders doing their job, be that at an economic development event, a policy announcement, or an emergency,” King told Spotlight PA. “The state plane is a tool that the governor can use to efficiently travel and interact with his constituents statewide.”
In September, Shapiro flew to Washington, D.C. for a six-hour stop during which he had private meetings with congressional leaders and spoke for a half-hour with Shapiro also used the plane to attend at least two sporting events last fall. While tickets for both of those games were purchased by an outside nonprofit, First, Shapiro was listed as a flight passenger on a multi-leg October itinerary in which the plane crisscrossed the state.
For a while, the expanded disclosure appeared to tamp down elected officials’ use of the state plane. State records show just 13 flights in 2011, the first year of the Corbett administration. However, use of the plane began to creep back up in the second half of Corbett’s tenure and then under Wolf. Corbett totaled 85 flights in his single term, costing almost $210,000; Wolf racked up 263 of them over eight years, costing almost $660,000.
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