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Compensation for state legislators should be a simple straight forward issue, and for one hundred and forty nine years of our state’s history it has been. It’s only in the last year that legislators have found it necessary to cloud, obscure and dodge the legislative pay issue.
It started at the beginning of the 2007 Session when the first issue taken up by Senate lawmakers was a 45 percent increase in their “per diem,” a daily allowance for meals and incidental expenses. The increase from $66 per day to $96 per day is on top of a legislator’s annual salary of $31,140 plus monthly housing and travel expenses.
Lawmakers can chose to take daily expenses seven days per week, everyday the Legislature is in session. With this option available, in one year the “per diems” for many Senators doubled and for some it more than tripled. One St. Paul Senator, who lives only a few miles from the Capitol, collected almost $22,000 in per diem in 2007.
The whopping increase in daily expense money set off a public outcry of opposition because legislators clearly sidestepped the Minnesota Constitution which states that pay increases for legislators can’t take effect until after the next election; a provision that wisely has kept state lawmakers from increasing their compensation until after they have faced the voters in the next election.
This constitutional provision has made legislators reluctant to increase their pay for a part time job fearing the voters would disapprove of their actions.
The discontentment with the action of current lawmakers, skirting the law with a 45 percent increase in daily expenses, came to a climax this year when a lawsuit was filed contending that state legislators had violated the Constitution by increasing the “per diems.” With the lawsuit still pending, legislators decided not to wait to find out what might happen if the court would take away their new ill gotten gain. Instead, they proceeded with a proposed change in the state constitution.
Just a few weeks after the lawsuit was filed in February, legislators in both bodies, introduced bills to change the Constitution so that a non-elected council of 16 people would decide the salary for House and Senate members.
As the former Dana Carvey “Church Lady” character, the purveyor of ethics and virtue on Saturday Night Live, use to say… “how convenient.”
First, legislators violate the Constitution by increasing their compensation during their current term of office. Then when a group of whistle blowers file a lawsuit, legislators pass a bill to change the Constitution. Oh what a tangled web this group has woven to avoid a simple straight forward method for pay increases; a method that has served the State for one hundred and forty nine years.
The system works like this; first, look up the compensation for state legislators, if you don’t like the pay, don’t file to run for office. Second, if you run and get elected, think of the job as part time public service, not your sole source of income or a life time career choice. Third, be honest, vote to increase your legislative salary, then wait and see if the voters still want you to serve in public office.
In our 150 years as a State, no seat in the State House or Senate has gone unfilled because the pay was too low. It is only a few self serving members who have made the Legislature their sole source of income that want to subvert the Constitution. If the goal is to achieve a more economically diverse Legislature, then the solution is to shorten the legislative session, not entice people with larger paychecks.
Phil Krinkie, a former Chairman of the House Taxes Committee, is President of the Taxpayers League of Minnesota |
