State Political Analysis: How Much Should We Pay?

By Len Lazarick

What if you haven't had a raise in five years and a consultant told your boss you should get a 5% salary hike three years from now? Would you turn down your first raise in eight years?
That's probably what the members of the Maryland General Assembly are going to do soon.
In early January, the General Assembly Compensation Commission recommended that the 141 delegates and 47 senators that will be elected this year get a $2,000 bump on their $43,500 annual salaries in 2013 - but only if the state's unemployment rate fell to 5% or below by then. The commission struggled with what to do with legislative pay at a time when many are jobless and state workers haven't had a pay hike themselves in the last two years.
It took only hours for Senate President Mike Miller and House Speaker Michael Busch to reject the offer out of hand. "Now is not the time to accept pay raises for legislators," Busch said - "especially when the state is facing big budget cuts," Miller said.
And especially not in an election year: A separate commission on the governor's salary recommended it go up $5,000 to $155,000 in 2013 and to $160,000 in 2014. Gov. Martin O'Malley said he wouldn't accept the raise.
The lawmakers will have to formally vote to reject the pay hikes for themselves to avoid an embarrassing raise in an election year. But they are expected to follow the lead of Miller and Busch, who were probably speaking for the bulk of legislators facing re-election.
It's hard for most people to wrap their arms around a $32 billion state budget, but a $43,500 salary is much easier to assess. That's especially true when you don't like the work product of the recipients.

A Convoluted Process
The nine compensation commissioners - five of them lawyers - struggled with the decision. Maryland legislators are nominally part-time and they are the second highest paid part-time lawmakers in the country. They're only required to show up to work at the session that lasts 90 calendar days and to a few committee meetings during the rest of the year. Most do much more than that.
Forty-one legislators (about 20%) say they work at the job full-time, but others juggle work as lawyers (18%) or in business (18%) and various other occupations in the fields of education, public administration, finance and insurance.
Lots of business people say they'd like to see more folks from the private sector making laws that impact them, but few would be willing to have a key employee absent three months of a year. Some of the people in law and other businesses could probably make more money doing their regular jobs.
On the other hand, $43,500 a year doesn't seem to deter people from becoming candidates.
Jack Sprague, a retired lobbyist and IBM employee who served on the commission, said the notion that the legislators only work the 90 days of their official session is "patently untrue."
"It is not in the classic sense a part-time legislature," Sprague said. "It is a job that requires you to be out there a lot."
On the other hand, "If we gave them $5,000 more, would we get a better legislature?" The answer to that question is pretty obvious.
Many full-time jobs pay less than $43,500 - a salary which would represent a pay hike for many a young journalist or teacher. Starting salaries for correctional officers, social workers and other state jobs are below that line.
Many people would love to be elected to the legislature or other offices, but the real sticking point is seldom the pay. It's the campaigning and the raising of money to win a campaign that deters many qualified people from running for office.

Six-Figure Salaries
While many state employees pull down small salaries, 5,200 state employees make more than $100,000 per year in base pay, a figure that is 10% higher than two years ago. About 3,900 of those employees work at the four-year colleges and universities; that means that only 2% of the employees in general state government get six figures, while 10% at the universities do.
There's a sharp divide between the tenured haves and untenured have-nots in academia. Thousands of graduate assistants and adjunct faculty members make peanuts. In fact, many adjuncts get $3,500 or less to teach a semester-long course.

Remembering Jim Clark
A ribbon-cutting at Howard Community College on Jan. 25 marked the opening of the renovated James Clark, Jr., Library Building.
Clark, Howard County's long-time state senator who served a term as Senate president, was instrumental in the funding of the college. He was part of what is now a dying breed at the State House - a fiscally conservative Democrat who was a progressive on the environment and civil rights. He left the Senate in 1986 and died in 2006 at age 87.
Clark was unhappy about the leftward drift of his party, and he would have been very upset at a number of things in the current state budget - particularly the raid on the open space funds and failure to fully fund pension liabilities.
Clark and then-Senate President William James were the architects of the state's 40-year-old open space program, and later Clark sponsored the farmland preservation program. (His 500-acre Clark's Elioak farm, located at the corner of Route 108 and Centennial Lane, is now run by his daughter, Martha Anne, part of it as a popular petting zoo.)
Jim Clark and Bill James got the legislature to approve an increase in the real estate transfer tax to be set aside to buy open space for parks across the state, and Clark sponsored a similar move to buy the development rights to farmland.
The pot of money for Program Open Space has been raided a number of times over the years to pay for other programs. Gov. Bob Ehrlich did it, and Gov. Martin O'Malley repeatedly promised during his campaign that he would not. While O'Malley is not reducing the amount of money to purchase shoreline, woodlands and swamps, he is paying for it with $70 million in general obligation bonds. In other words, he is replacing cash with debt.
Clark also fought hard in the '80s to begin advance funding of pensions for state employees and teachers, increase the contributions they had to make and reduce the benefits. Despite heavy union opposition, the legislature went along.
Six years ago, state pension liabilities were 92% funded. This allowed the state to start trimming back its payments. That reduction, along with the 2008 collapse of the stock market, has left the pensions only 65% funded, with $17 billion in liabilities to be made up during the next 30 years.
Clark would have been even more unsettled with the spending on the federal level. He went around the country for years, urging state legislatures to call for a constitutional convention to pass a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution. He came close, but never succeeded.
Today, the federal budget grows more unbalanced by the day, and the national debt now stands at $12 trillion.
I can almost hear Jim Clark shouting from the grave. We could use more people like him in politics.