Lawmaker whose second job running trade group raised ethics concerns says he’s stepping down

HARRISBURG — A Pennsylvania state lawmaker who is simultaneously leading a trade group that pays a lobbyist to influence state government has announced he will resign at the end of the month.

State Rep. Seth Grove (R., York), a conservative first elected to a central Pennsylvania district nearly two decades ago, said last May that he would retire at the end of his current term.

That same month, the Pennsylvania Concrete and Aggregates Association announced that it had appointed Grove to a leadership position that he would assume in 2026, a trade industry publication reported. He began serving as president and CEO on Jan. 1 of this year.

While allowed under the state’s lax ethics laws, the arrangement raised concerns among some Democratic colleagues and at least one ethics expert.

A news release announcing Grove’s resignation as of Jan. 31 did not list a reason. When asked if it was linked to his new job, Grove said in a text message, “Nope. Just done.”

Spotlight PA reported on Grove’s side job and the ethical concerns in its Access Harrisburg newsletter last month.

Under state law, lawmakers are allowed to hold outside employment while serving in the General Assembly, even though it’s a full-time legislature. More than half of Grove’s colleagues do as well, according to a Philadelphia Inquirer review of ethics disclosures from 2024, serving as lawyers, landlords, fitness instructors, and pilots, among other occupations.

Legislators are also allowed to lobby their former colleagues as long as more than one year has elapsed between the end of their term in office. There are loopholes, however. As written, the law only bans former officials from lobbying their specific employer. That means a former state House member can lobby the state Senate, or vice versa.

But Grove’s situation does raise ethical concerns, said Kedric Payne, general counsel and senior director of ethics for the Campaign Legal Center in Washington, D.C.

“In a situation where you are representing an outside group that's appearing before [you], there is a potential conflict of interest, because the public questions whether or not your official actions are to protect your constituents or to protect your clients,” Payne told Spotlight PA.

He added that “there is no inherent problem letting officials have outside employment” and that it is common across different jurisdictions, especially at the local level. But especially in a full-time legislature like Pennsylvania’s, “it means you're inviting a large amount of potential conflicts of interest when you allow that to happen.”

“So it means you have to have an even stronger ethics enforcement body in place,” Payne said.

Grove is the ranking Republican on the state House Labor and Industry Committee, which handles unemployment compensation, workplace regulations, and labor rights. PACA, meanwhile, represents some 164 members in the construction materials industry. Its chief executive has not historically been registered to lobby, but the group does employ a third-party lobbyist, according to state records.

When Spotlight PA asked Grove in December if he planned to resign, he said in an email: “Members of the General Assembly are allowed outside employment.”

He added that he would recuse himself from votes as needed, downplayed the group’s work with the state government, and said that he wouldn’t be lobbying.

“No lobbying — I can’t stress this enough because people think I am going to be a lobbyist,” Grove wrote. “I don’t want to be a lobbyist. I don’t want to lobby. This job doesn’t lobby.”

He also said that he had sought an ethics opinion on his situation, but declined to share its ruling.

Mary Fox, executive director of the State Ethics Commission, told Spotlight PA in December that she was not aware “of any Commission decisions that address your specific question about whether legislators can work for or run advocacy groups that lobby the legislature while they are serving as legislators.”

Grove’s situation attracted the attention of Democratic groups and colleagues, who criticized the arrangement. One, state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta (D., Philadelphia), introduced a proposal to explicitly ban sitting public officials from working at trade organizations or lobbying firms.

“This is not the only issue we have in state government as it relates to issues of ethics and issues of perception and things that erode public trust,” Kenyatta told Spotlight PA. “But I do think this is a glaring example of it.”

Asked by Spotlight PA if he had looked at the legislation, state House Majority Leader Matt Bradford (D., Montgomery) said: “I have not. I will.” Bradford is of counsel at a suburban Philadelphia law firm and earns outside income from that position.

Grove is no stranger to attention. A vocal, wonkish conservative with a dry sense of humor, he called himself “The Architect" in 2021 as he led state House Republicans’ review of Pennsylvania’s election law and the chamber’s redistricting efforts later that year.

The former culminated in an omnibus election bill that Gov. Tom Wolf vetoed, because it expanded the state’s voter ID requirements. Wolf also vetoed a congressional map drawn by the then-GOP-controlled legislature, claiming it represented a Republican gerrymander.

Weeks after the 2020 election, Grove also hosted a news conference questioning why Dominion Voting Systems backed out of a hearing on its machines, which were a common target of conspiracy theories, and organized a letter asking Congress to dispute the election’s results.

Combined, these efforts made Grove a frequent target of Democratic criticism. But he also took stances that infuriated his conservative colleagues, including pushing back on Trump-driven misinformation, opposing a forensic audit of the 2020 election, and saying that the only voter fraud that occurred that year was from Republicans.

“I’m not a member of the Trump campaign. I don’t do litigation. I’m not an attorney. But if I had proven cases of fraud, I would have brought that to the forefront right away and [it] would be included in my court documents,” Grove told the Pennsylvania Capital-Star in November 2020. “I don’t know how to remedy that for the Trump campaign.”

Grove also sponsored a law in 2020 to reopen open records offices shuttered by Wolf during the COVID-19 pandemic and a dozen-plus more on issues including motorcycle safety, vaccine access, and school building upgrades.

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