Santorum, Rick
Accused Party Type: Official - Elected
Accused Party Title: U.S. Senator
Court or Office: U.S. Senate
Accused State: Pennsylvania
State of Complaint:
Pennsylvania
Types of Misconduct:
Ethics
Website:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Santorum
Rating of the Accused Party: 5
Rick Santorum, used
$100,000 of PA state funds earmarked for that state's school children to educate his own children, who were not residents of Pennsylvania. source (
http://www.postgazette.com/pg/04323/413787.stm)
In the news release, Pennsylvania Department of Education Awards $20.9 Million
to Promote Academic Achievement and Assist At-Risk Students in High-Poverty Schools, issued 19-Jan-2012 by Pennsylvania Department of Education over PR Newswire, we are advised by the organization that the headline and the first paragraph,
first sentence, should read "$64.4 million" rather than "$20.9 million" as originally issued inadvertently. In addition, several of the dollar amounts in the Editor's Note were incorrectly listed. The complete, corrected release follows:
Pennsylvania Department of Education Awards $64.4 Million to Promote Academic Achievement and Assist At-Risk Students in High-Poverty Schools
HARRISBURG, Pa., Jan. 19, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Secretary of Education Ron Tomalis today announced the 57 schools and organizations that will receive a total of $64.4 million as part of the 21st Century Community Learning Challenge Grant.
***
Richard John "Rick" Santorum (born May 10, 1958) is a former United States Senator from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Santorum is a member of the Republican Party and was the chairman of the Senate Republican Conference.
Santorum is considered both a social and fiscal conservative.
He is particularly known for his stances on the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Social Security, intelligent design, homosexuality, and the Terri Schiavo case.
In
March 2007, Santorum joined the law firm Eckert Seamans Cherin & Mellott, LLC. He was to primarily practice law in the firm’s Pittsburgh and
Washington, D.C. offices, where he was to provide business and strategic counseling services to the firm's clients. In addition to his work with the firm, Santorum also serves as a
Senior Fellow with the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., and was a contributor to Fox News Channel.
Santorum is a prospective presidential candidate in 2012. He formed a presidential exploratory commitee on April 13, 2011.
***
In November 2004, a controversy developed over education costs for Santorum's children. Santorum's legal address is a three-bedroom house in Penn Hills, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh, which he purchased for $87,800 in 1997 and is located next to the home of his wife's parents. But since 2001, he has spent most of the year in Leesburg, Virginia, a town about one hour's drive west of Washington, D.C., and about 90 minutes' drive south of the Pennsylvania border, in a house he purchased for $643,000. The Penn Hills Progress, a local paper, reported that Santorum and his wife paid about $2,000 per year in property taxes on their Pennsylvania home ($487.20 per year to Allegheny County, 2006 through 2008, based on a 2007 value of $106,000, plus Penn Hills School District tax). The paper also found that another couple — possibly renters — were registered voters at the same address.
At the time the issue arose, Santorum's five older children attended the Western Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School, with 80 percent of tuition costs paid by the Penn Hills School District. At a meeting in November 2004, the Penn Hills School District announced that it did not believe Santorum met the qualifications for residency status, because he and his family spent most of the year in Virginia.
They demanded repayment of tuition costs totaling $67,000.
When news reports showed Sen. Santorum was renting his Penn Hills home, Santorum withdrew his five children from the cyber education program that Penn Hills School District paid for.
That saved Penn Hills taxpayers about $38,000 a year. Although Santorum said he would make other arrangements for his children's education, he insisted that he did not owe the school board any back tuition.
Once the controversy surfaced, the children were withdrawn from the cyber school and were then home schooled.
July 8, 2005, a Pennsylvania state hearing officer had ruled that the Penn Hills School District had not filed objections to Santorum's residency in a timely manner and dismissed the complaint. Santorum hailed the ruling as a victory against what he termed "baseless and politically motivated charges". Santorum told reporters that "[n]o one's children — and especially not small, school-age children — should be used as pawns in the 'politics of personal destruction.'" In the 2006 senate campaign, Santorum ran television commercials with Santorum's son saying "My dad's opponents have criticized him for moving us to Washington so we could be with him more."
September 2006, the Pennsylvania Department of Education agreed to pay the district $55,000 to settle the dispute over money withheld from the district to pay for the children of U.S. Senator Rick Santorum to attend a cyber charter school.
The matter rose again in May 2006. Santorum has said that his family stays during holidays and at times on weekends at the Penn Hills house. But the Progress reported in May that the house appeared unoccupied, and Casey's campaign noted that in a press release. Santorum then accused Casey's campaign of supporting trespassing on his property, saying of Casey "Now that he is a nominee, it is time for him to start acting like a candidate instead of a thug." Casey, in a statement, called the charges "false and malicious." His campaign, in a news release, described Santorum's actions as "weirdness".
September 2006, Santorum formally asked that the county remove the homestead tax exemption from his Penn Hills residence. He said that he had made similar requests to county officials in conversations in 2005 and earlier in 2006, but to no avail. In his letter, Santorum insisted that he was entitled to the exemption, which is worth about $70 annually, but chose not to take advantage of it because of the political dispute. While homeowners in the county are eligible for a tax savings averaging $70 a year on their primary residences, the county council president noted that Santorum had "said during a televised debate that he spends about 30 days in his Penn Hills house each year.".
Allegheny County Election Office records indicate that, while a registered voter in the county, Santorum had since 1995 voted absentee.
The only way for Santorum to not pay for his children's private education was to enroll them in the Penn Hills School District. Virginia state law only requires local school districts to pay for private school tuition fee when a student has disabilities and enrolls in a school that can satisfy his or her needs, according to Charles Pyle, Virginia Department of Education spokesman. Otherwise, children in Virginia must attend their local public schools.
Santorum's supporters have said that the controversy is politically motivated because the school board is controlled by Democrats (Erin Vecchio, the school board member who first publicly raised the issue, is the chair of the local Democratic Party). They also have said that since Santorum votes in Penn Hills and pays property and school taxes there, he is entitled to the same privileges as any other Penn Hills resident and should not be deprived of these privileges as a result of his service in the U.S. Senate.
Non-residency issues have raised questions of hypocrisy, in that Santorum had previously castigated Representative Doug Walgren for moving away from his district.
It was on the news several times, run down grass not cut, no furniture. But he claimed to commute back there every week. He refused to back down. Then he rented it out and bad for him, the renters registered to vote with frothy's address. Still frothy wouldn't back down and claimed to live there on tv. Well it gets better. Frothy then enrolled his kids in some online charter school and billed the school district in PA $20,000 per kid per year for their education, while he was living in VA. The school district won against frothy, but missed some sort of legal deadline. Frothy has never paid the money back to date. 
