Camden: Another pay raise coming its way for state lawmakers

But wait, some of them might say, we handle citizen problems year-round and regularly go into special session, so we work longer than that. True, but they also have a work schedule during the regular session that counts every day of the week in that 105 or 60, and legislators almost never work Saturday and Sunday. In fact, many of them have schedules that require their presence no earlier than noon most Mondays, and the Capitol campus parking lots are all but empty most Fridays by midafternoon.

There’s no bonus for a special session, but lawmakers can put in for their $120 per diem for each day of the special session whether they are in Olympia or not.

If this seems silly or outrageous, you can’t blame legislators, at least not directly. They don’t set their own salaries, or those of the elected members of the other two branches of government.

Back in the 1980s, legislators got tired of flak whenever they raised their own pay. So they sent voters a constitutional amendment passing the job to a special commission of citizen volunteers. Voters went for it.

At the time, a legislator made $13,750 a year. The first year of the commission’s existence, it bumped them to $15,500, and with the exception of a few years in the early ’90s, pay rose steadily to $42,106 by 2008, when the recession came along. That froze pay until 2014. While that may have been a hardship, it should be noted that regular state employees took a pay cut during part of that period. So did many workers in private businesses.

Legislators got a $3,000 bump in 2015 and about $1,500 more in 2016. So compared to 2014, they’ll be up more than 15.5 percent by next September.

Legislators vs. teachers

During discussions leading to this year’s push to fund public schools, some legislators took issue with the way to compare a teacher’s salary to jobs in the much-revered private sector.

Lawmaker pay is calculated similarly. Consultants back in 2004 set up a system for the commission to compare legislators to a certain level of manager in state government, taking 70 percent of the salary at the low end of the pay scale because it’s “considered to be a position that works 70 percent of a full-time job.”

Really? Some legislators don’t even work 70 percent of the 105 days of a regular session, and who knows what kind of hours they put in after that? But they’ll get the raise unless citizens mount a referendum drive, which would require gathering about 130,000 signatures in 90 days.

That’s unlikely. So maybe now that they’re getting their raises, they’ll think twice about complaining about the raises for state employees and shut the heck up about raising pay for teachers to a minimum $45,000 a year. Any legislator who thinks a starting teacher doesn’t work at least 95 percent as much as they do should switch jobs for a week. Maybe they can earn the extra money by coming up with a budget before July 1 so the state doesn’t go into a partial shutdown.

And perhaps next year, finish the session on time.