Legislator pay: baseball it ain't.

• Author: Hansen, Karen
• Position: Cover Story

Like America's pastime, service in the average legislature demands hard work, many skills, long hours of tedium and frustration, crowd-pleasing behavior - but unlike baseball, the pay is far from adequate.

The work is challenging, the hours are long, the rewards are great. Whether you're a legislator in New Hampshire or California, New York or Nevada, the job is essentially the same. The money, however, is not.

Public service is expected to entail sacrifice - time away from one's family, a professional career put on hold, compensation forgone. But in America's legislatures, pay should not be a significant barrier to public service. A democracy is not truly representative if the only people who can afford to serve are the retired, the wealthy or those whose employers make up the difference between a legislative salary and professional wages.

"No one should go into politics to get rich," says Massachusetts Senate President Tom Birmingham. "But you can't have a system where only the rich get into politics."

Unlike almost any other segment of the work force, legislative pay has not kept up with inflation over the past 25 years, particularly in the large states with full-time legislatures where as a group lawmakers' wages lag 13 percent behind the cost of living.

Ideally, legislative compensation should attract a diversity of candidates with good experience in professional and other fields. Although no state has suffered from a dearth of candidates eager and willing to do the people's business, raising legislative pay is always a difficult issue politically, for lawmakers and their employers - the citizens. So difficult, in fact, that 11 states have not seen a raise this decade. It's been 17 years since Louisiana lawmakers have received a pay increase and 16 years for legislators in Arizona.

SALARIES THAT HAVEN'T CHANGED IN 10 YEARS OR MORE State Last Change Arizona 1981 Colorado 1985 Indiana 1986 Louisiana 1980 Mississippi 1985 Nevada 1985

In private business, the usual practice today is to give pay raises to employees every year. And civil service, legislative and other public employees also receive annual increases. In some cases, employees may even see two raises a year - an automatic cost of living increase and a step increase based on merit or longevity.

But legislators find themselves in the political crossfire when their own salary is the issue - one so highly charged that the means to a pay raise may be more criticized than the money.

NEGOTIATING A MINE FIELD

Massachusetts is a case study of the politics of pay. In a lame duck session in 1982, lawmakers raised their pay to $30,000 and tied it to a judicial pay raise that was immune to referendum. In the spring of 1987 they raised their salary to $40,000, making it retroactive to Jan. 1. Still smarting from the way the legislature handled the 1982 pay increase, 83 percent of the citizens voted to repeal the 1987 pay raise in the 1988 general election. Lawmakers had collected the higher salary for more than a year.

Then, in 1994, supported by a McCormick Foundation study, lawmakers tried again to raise their pay from $30,000 to $46,410. This time they tied the legislative pay raise to an appropriations bill that was repeal-proof.

The media went nuts.

Said a story in the Boston Globe Dec. 4, 1994:

"It's not necessarily what they do, as much as it is how they do it. It is conduct rather than content that rattles our cage and causes citizens to look at legislators voting themselves a pay raise the same way we view urban looters running out of shattered storefronts at the height of a riot carrying all sorts of appliances."

The public, of course, responded in kind. The Coalition for Payraise Repeal sponsored an initiative to cut the pay to $23,205 and limit the session to six months. The group collected 87,000 signatures and presented [TABULAR DATA OMITTED] the petitions to a legislative committee.

Testimony on the issue outlined the conflicting views of public service.

"When this act goes into effect," said Alex Chatfield, a clinical social worker, "your base pay will be comparable to mine. I believe it is wrong for the legislature to take the pay raise when they did and how they did. It was an act of greed and arrogance."

Said former U.S. Senator Paul Tsongas: "We have to have a legislature that is fast enough and experienced enough to stay ahead. You're not going to get that for $23,000 a year."

Said Barbara Anderson of Citizens for Limited Taxation: "There are a lot of special-interest groups and lobbyists who favor keeping the present full-time legislative session and pay scale, but that's because it works for them. It doesn't work for the regular working person who's stuck paying for it."

Said Senate President Birmingham: "You get what...