In Pennsylvania, the payout for the claim against Caltagirone, a Democrat, came from a state insurance fund. Caltagirone has consistently denied any allegations against him. He said he is prohibited from talking about the settlement, but that it did not result in any cost to taxpayers that he was aware of. Bill Patton, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania House Democrats, could not confirm that assertion.
In recent years, settlements agreed to by state legislatures have been revealed as court cases occurred or victims spoke out. They include a $1.75 million settlement in Iowa involving Republican senators; a $400,000 settlement in Kentucky involving a Democratic state representative; and $620,000 for two settlements in New York, one involving a Democratic state assemblyman, and another involving a Senate employee.
Illinois state Rep. David McSweeney, a Republican, proposed a ban on the use of public dollars for settlements after revelations of settlements involving members of Congress. McSweeney said he doesn’t know of any Illinois state lawmakers who used taxpayer dollars to settle harassment claims. But more than 200 men and women recently signed a letter saying that harassment in the state Capitol was rampant.
Allowing public money to cover lawmakers’ sexual harassment claims encourages bad behavior, McSweeney said, adding that his proposal would help prevent it.
"God forbid, if someone does this behavior," he said, "you are going to be exposed, and you are to be punished."
Most of the proposals would cover state lawmakers but not all state employees, even though plenty of settlements have involved the latter.
The amount spent on harassment and discrimination settlements, including sexual harassment and many other forms of discrimination, for all state employees in California was $25 million in the last three years; in Florida, $11 million since 1992; in New York, $10 million in the last nine years.
And in Pennsylvania, the state spent $900,000 on a single payout in 2016, after a longtime employee accused a midlevel manager in the Revenue Department of harassing her, sexually assaulting her, and making racial slurs, including references to slavery, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Minna Kotkin, a law professor and director of the Employment Law Clinic at Brooklyn Law School in New York, questions why there isn't also a movement to ban the use of public money to settle claims involving employees who aren’t elected officials.
She pointed out that police brutality cases often raise the same questions about employee and employer responsibility, and there aren’t proposals to make individual officers pay in those cases, either.
The proposal in Iowa, unlike in other states, would require all state employees to pay to settle claims against them. All 20 Senate Democrats and an independent senator introduced the bill.
Some victims file claims against employers, not individuals because it helps ensure that they will be compensated for any damages. The government can easily cut a check to compensate the victim for a lawmaker’s actions, Yamada said, while the individual lawmaker may not have the financial resources to do so.
In Pennsylvania, state Rep. Leanne Krueger-Braneky, a Democrat, said her proposal would ensure the victim is made whole by requiring the state to pay the settlement amount and then requiring the lawmaker to reimburse the state.
The bill also would allow the state to tap into lawmakers’ pensions to settle claims, Krueger-Braneky said.
"My goal is this language is strong enough that no legislator engages in harassment activity ever again," she said. "But if it happens there will be a clear, nonpolitical way to address it and a real cost to the legislator."
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