HARRISBURG — It’s bloated and wasteful, generously salted with patronage hires and a publicly funded re-election system for incumbent state legislators.

Or it’s an army of devoted public servants, both an underappreciated element in drafting and debating bills and the indispensable front-line troops who help taxpayers do battle with bureaucrats.

The truth about Pennsylvania’s legislative work force of 3,000 probably can be found somewhere in between, but the reputation of the General Assembly’s staff has become tarnished in recent years.

Allegations of the misuse of legislative resources for political campaigns and other illegal purposes, which have brought criminal charges against a couple dozen current or former state lawmakers and their aides, have led to sworn testimony that many staffers spent significant time of their work hours working on elections or performing menial personal errands for their bosses.

There have already been 10 convictions, two acquittals and a mistrial, with additional trials scheduled later this year.

By any measure, the Pennsylvania Legislature is one of the largest in the nation. A 2009 study by the National Conference of State Legislatures ranked Pennsylvania’s second in total spending behind California, second in per capita spending behind Alaska, and second in spending as a percentage of general government operations behind Nevada.

The NCSL said Pennsylvania employs about one of every 11 state legislative employees nationally, with the state having 4 percent of the country’s population.

The Legislature’s budget is often mentioned as a target for budget trimming, although Gov. Tom Corbett’s $27.3 billion spending proposal for next year, with deep cuts in education and health care to fill a $4 billion budget gap, included only a $4.3 million, or 1.4 percent, reduction for the General Assembly, to $297 million.

Corbett’s budget would not touch the Legislature’s $189 million surplus, defended by members as a cushion against a budget showdown with the executive branch.

“Surplus moneys should be helping people stay in their houses and not sitting in a reserve,” freshman Rep. Tina Davis, D-Bucks, told the Bucks County Courier Times.

If the governor and lawmakers do decide to squeeze more savings from the legislative branch, an obvious place to start would be personnel costs, which run about $119 million for House and Senate salaries alone. Most of those jobs also have benefits.

In the Capitol, where more than half the Legislature’s work force is stationed, the higher end of the salary scale consists of more than 200 people who make at least $80,000 — generally lawyers, committee directors, supervisors and policy developers.

Below them is the bulk of the staff, people who do research, analyze legislation, spread lawmakers’ message and do administrative and clerical jobs.

In the House, which publishes much more descriptive job titles than the Senate, the work force has an array of responsibilities, including 617 legislative assistants, 363 district office managers or constituent outreach specialists, 95 research analysts, 50 custodians, two archivists, an editor, an asset manager and a proofreader.

A $36,000-a-year attendant keeps the House chamber and adjoining areas clean and in repair, while a lounge attendant earns $37,000 to, among other things, be available to cut members’ hair.

The other side of legislative staff operations consists of constituent services, more than a thousand people in hundreds of district offices around the state.

Constituent service is nothing new, but the massive system in place today is an institution that many people have come to make their first stop when they have issues related to government.

They commonly help out with driver’s licensing and other PennDOT issues, as well as applications for the state’s property tax, rent, prescription drug and heating oil assistance.

Constituent service information is displayed on official websites, and it would be hard to overstate how much lawmakers value the existing system.

Interviews with representatives and senators about these resources produced a variety of answers. Some members have several district offices and a staff of a dozen or more, while others get by with just one office back home and a staff of two or three.

“How we staff our district offices is really a closely held mystery,” said Rep. Glen Grell, R-Cumberland, who has one of the smallest complements in the Legislature: a district office manager in Mechanicsburg and a secretary in the Capitol.

“We all represent the same number of people, so if I can do it with one or two, that might be closer to what’s really needed than eight or 10,” he said.

A typical House member has a staff of about five, a typical senator, about 11.

Leaders tend to have the largest staffs, because they supervise many people who serve the entire caucus. Longtime members and committee chairmen also generally get more employees, and many members say they have to justify the need based on workload, but beyond that, staffing decisions can be mystifying.

Asked about the process, the two top-ranking Republican leaders, Sens. Joe Scarnati and Dominic Pileggi, said the “dynamics ... vary for many reasons,” including the area of the districts.

Senate Minority Leader Jay Costa, D-Allegheny, said senators “are made fully aware of staffing and district office guidelines.”

“Pennsylvania is truly a diverse state,” wrote Republican House leaders Sam Smith and Mike Turzai. “There is no quota system in place for office space or office work.”

House Democratic Leader Frank Dermody did not respond to written questions on the topic.

According to the 203-member House’s most recent annual report on salaries, the chamber’s active work force numbered 1,935 at the end of December, with a payroll of $76.3 million.

Some of the data released by the House clerk’s office is erroneous, dated or misleading, but it provides the best approximation of the actual work force. It includes, for example, 99 aides, including 63 employees, who are supposedly supervised by 16 representatives who retired, died or were defeated last year.

It showed the House paid $4.3 million in salaries to 82 people in communications, media, broadcasting, mail and similar specialties. There were four photographers and two photography supervisors.

Ten House chiefs of staff had an average pay of $95,000, while the 56-person corps of messengers and messenger-drivers, a group that includes 11 supervisors and often looks as busy as anyone in the building, pulled down an average of $28,000.

The Senate, which releases its salary data in real time, had 855 employees and a $42.8 million payroll as of late January. Senate job titles are fewer: administrative, chief of staff, constituency relations, legislative support, policy development and professional-and-managerial.

Not included in the House and Senate pay reports are about a dozen legislative service agencies, such as the Joint State Government Commission and the Legislative Data Processing Center, which together employ more than 170 people and have total budget costs of more than $18 million.

Anyone who has spent much time in the Capitol has likely encountered intelligent, ethical and hard-working legislative employees, and probably experienced their culture of helpfulness. Indiscriminate payroll cuts would certainly sweep away real talent along with dead wood.

“Some of the most competent, intelligent and committed people I’ve ever met in public and private life have been members of the Legislature’s staff,” said Steve Crawford, a lobbying firm executive and former House Democratic aide who was Gov. Ed Rendell’s chief of staff. “They’re an easy mark, of course, but I’m one of their biggest defenders.”

Other candidates in the legislative branch for belt-tightening might include the General Assembly’s more peripheral enterprises: It maintains a gym, a clinic staffed by four nurses and a physician, and, in the Senate, a dining room.

Outside Harrisburg, legislative employees tend to focus on constituent service, most commonly help with government agencies — signing people up for state programs, spreading information about state programs, troubleshooting bureaucratic problems and involving themselves in all manner of federal or local issues.

The two chambers together maintain about 400 district offices around the state, plus dozens of satellite offices that are open only a few hours a week. In the Senate alone, district office rent and utilities have cost nearly $5 million since the start of 2009.