Patrick M. Browne is a Republican member of the Pennsylvania State Senate who has represented the 16th District since 2005. His district includes portions of Lehigh County. Browne has served as Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman since November 2014. He is also a member of the Communications & Technology, Education, Finance and Transportation Committees. Browne is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame and Temple University Law School. He is a graduate of Allentown Central Catholic High School. Prior to his election to the State Senate, Browne worked as Certified Public Accountant and attorney. He also was a tax manager for Coopers and Lybrand from 1990 to 1994 and a tax supervisor for Price Waterhouse from 1986 to 1990. Browne was a member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives from 1994 to 2005. In 2005, he won a special election to fill the Senate seat vacated by Charlie Dent who resigned to take a seat in the United States House of Representatives. Browne has been arrested three times for DUI offenses, most recently in 2015 following a motorcycle accident resulting in a punctured lung. Browne's longtime campaign committee treasurer, Michael P. Ellwood, was arrested in September, 2019 on 179 criminal counts involving the embezzlement of $578K in campaign funds over 11 years. Browne has been accused of corruption with regard to legislation he wrote in 2009 to give tax breaks to companies in a newly designated Neighborhood Improvement Zone in Allentown. His wife Heather was hired as a lobbyist with Harrisburg-based Pugliese Associates in 2010 and then quickly hired by multiple companies that benefited substantially from the NIZ provisions. Several beneficiaries of the NIZ have also made significant campaign contributions to Pat Browne, according to state records. Browne also pushed in 2013 to designate a City Revitalization and Improvement Zone in Bethlehem with similar tax breaks, and the same year Heather Browne was hired as a lobbyist by the biggest potential beneficiary of that fiscal arrangement. In 2019 Browne announced that he had succeeded in diverting hundreds of millions of dollars of PennDOT funding to a project that will add another interchange on a rural stretch of Route 78, though he admitted that area residents oppose it. His stated purpose in advocating for the interchange was to allow businesses to build warehouses on cheap farmland in one of the few areas of the Lehigh Valley where until then they had not proliferated.
