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Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Ind. Gov't. - More on: Could this be a coincidence?

Sunday morning the ILB posted an entry commenting that three different papers had items that day introducing the topic of raising the salaries of members of the Indiana General Assembly. That seemed odd, following directly on the heels of numerous stories about the members' pension plan, for which the legislators receive four taxpayer dollars for every dollar they themselves contribute, and the healthcare for life plan, for which members of the Indiana Senate, at least this year, continue to be eligible, and which is being utilized by an unidentified number (at least in the many dozens) of "retired" former legislators from both houses, their spouses, former spouses, children, and staff.

Now today the Indianapolis Star has an editorial headlined "They deserve raise if perks are pared." Some quotes:

Overall compensation also isn't nearly as bad as the base pay indicates. Leadership stipends and compensation for expenses -- $137 a day during sessions and $54.80 each day that legislators aren't in session -- boosted average pay to just under $45,000 last year.

And until recently, the perks, including lifetime health insurance and extraordinary pension benefits, were well beyond what most private sector employees could expect. The House has dropped the heavily subsidized health-care perk, and the Senate is in the process of eliminating it. The generous retirement benefit remains.

Then the Star's justification for raises:
The low salary has prompted legislators over the years to reward themselves with extraordinary perks. That's not, in the end, a bargain for taxpayers.
A different Star editorial from 2004 is no longer freely accessible but is quoted in this ILB entry - some of which I will now repeat:
The Indianapolis Star has an informative editorial today about legislative compensation, explaining that things are not precisely as they appear. The title is "Behind the curtain: legislators' compenation." It begins:
John Bartlett * * *, chairman of the Public Officers Compensation Advisory Commission, notes that legislators haven't received a pay raise in 21 years.

Yet Bartlett admits he didn't check out legislators' perks. Like the $134 per day each one receives during sessions for food and lodging expenses. It adds up to an additional $8,174 a year. Then there's the state's match of $4 for every buck a legislator contributes to his pension. Legislators, by the way, inexcusably voted this year to keep the size of those pensions secret.

Why didn't the commission take those extras and others into account? Because, Bartlett says, the statute creating the panel charged it with considering "wages and wages only."

The Star piece continues:
The Star Editorial Board decided to pull back the curtain and do its own examination of the rewards lawmakers receive. The perks include a generous pension, dinners and gifts from lobbyists, the ability to go to work as a lobbyist immediately after leaving office and lawmakers hired as deans at state universities. With all this, and the state's mounting fiscal problems, it's no wonder Hoosiers reacted with suspicion at the commission's recommendation.
The Star goes on to detail the perks, in five sections with headings such as "Pension secrets." That section explains:
The General Assembly this year passed a bill making details of individual legislators' pensions secret. Only four lawmakers voted against the measure. State Rep. Tom Saunders, R-Lewisville, was one of them. He says: "If I'm generating revenue from the taxpayers, they need to know how much."

Most of his colleagues, however, don't agree. Perhaps it's arrogance. Or frustration with the flak they receive for proposing pay raises. But the legislature has taken the tack that the best way to deal with compensation is by granting themselves sweet deals without public consultation.

Take for instance then-Gov. Frank O'Bannon's veto of legislation that would have given health benefits to former legislators who served a mere six years in office.

In response, Senate President Pro Tempore Robert Garton and then-Speaker John Gregg invoked a 2001 law and signed off on funding the perk from the general fund. Forget the budget deficit. And forget the fact that ordinary state employees' salaries haven't kept up with inflation. Lawmakers took care of their own desires.

Regular readers will recall that the ILB posted a number of entries on "PERF privacy" earlier this year, including this one, which begins:
Last evening Governor Kernan announced that he had signed into law HEA 1285. As a result, the law is now in effect, retroactive to September 1, 2003. This new law will prevent anyone from accessing PERF information, other than member names and years of service, through a FOIA request.
In my Sunday entry I cited the information provided by the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), which shows that professional legislatures such as Michigan and Illinois are among the most highly paid. Here is a reproduction of Table 2 from the NCSL "full vs. part-time legislatures" page - I've inserted the states of Illinois, Michigan, Indiana and Iowa, which were mentioned in the Sunday articles, according to their NCSL rank:

Table 2. Average Job Time, Compensation and Staff Size by Category of Legislature

Category of LegislatureTime on the Job (1)Compensation (2)Staff per Member (3)
Red [ILLINOIS, MICHIGAN]80% $68,5998.9
White [IOWA] 70%$35,3263.1
Blue [INDIANA]54%$15,9841.2
Notes:
1. Estimated proportion of a full-time job spent on legislative work including time in session, constituent service, interim committee work, and election campaigns.
2. Estimated annual compensation of an average legislator including salary, per diem, and any other unvouchered expense payments.
3. Ratio of total legislative staff to number of legislators.
Source: NCSL, 2004

One might look at this table and conclude that, as part-time legislators, Indiana members at $45,000 a year including expenses, already are paid a good deal more than part-time legislators in other states (where the average, including expenses, is $15,984). So perhaps the question should be: Do we want to go to a professional legislature, one where members are paid perhaps $66,000 a year, as is our Secretary of State (who presumably, although I can't say for sure, receives the same health benefits and retirement as other state employees) - enough that their legislative service is not a second job? A related question - if we have a professional legislature, do we also want it to be a full-time legislature?

[More] Gary Welsh at Advance Indiana also has a post on this topic. He points to the Illinois legislators voting themselves another pay raise; which reminds me that the Pennsylvania voters are still reacting to the "middle-of-the-night" pay raises voted in by their legislature last year. This year, amidst continuing voter outrage, the pay raises were repealed, but not soon enough to save the jobs of one Supreme Court justice and, as I recall, both their House and Senate leaders. (See e.g. these ILB entries from 11/9/05 and from 5/17/06 ("Voter backlash continues in Pennsylvania").

Posted by Marcia Oddi on November 28, 2006 06:37 PM
Posted to Indiana Government | Legislative Benefits