Dear Neighbor,
Greetings from the Capitol, where the subject of legislative salaries has made recent headlines. Since I have sometimes used these e-letters to explain in a little more depth what is going on, I thought that would be a good approach for this letter on legislative pay, since it is one of those issues that gains a lot of attention.
Many of you might have heard there was a recent announcement indicating an independent council has determined legislator salaries will raise from $31,100 per year to $45,000. This is the first such salary adjustment recommended by the new council, which was created as the result of Minnesota voters approving the constitutional amendment last November.
First to update you on where the issue now stands. House Speaker Speaker Kurt Daudt on Thursday directed the Minnesota House Controller to not implement the salary recommendation from the Legislative Salary Council. Although this could raise a constitutional issue, for now at least it takes the raise off the table, subject of course to any legal issues which could happen as a result of the constitutional amendment that was passed.
It’s important to know the issue we now face traces back to 2013 when there was one-party control of the House, the Senate and the governor’s office. At that time the Legislature approved a constitutional amendment, without bi-partisan support, to put a question on the ballot which was finally voted on last fall. The question they prescribed read:
“Shall the Minnesota Constitution be amended to remove legislators’ ability to set their own salaries, and instead establish an independent, citizens-only council to prescribe salaries for legislators?”
Because that constitutional amendment passed with a 76-percent majority of citizen approval, the 16-member Legislative Salary Council was created and their decision resulted in the recent salary raise announcement.
However, from the people who have contacted me in the last few days I think the amendment may be having the opposite effect of what many intended when they voted for it. My sense from those comments is the language selected for the question probably should have been somewhat different and maybe read something like “Should a panel of unelected officials without elected accountability to the public be able to unilaterally provide legislators with a binding salary change?”
Whether that wording should have been different, or it was intentionally drafted to obtain the result of a hoped-for pay increase, at this point it really does not matter of course, because we now have a new constitutional amendment that needs to be followed. What the situation does expose however is how far-reaching a constitutional amendment is, and how important its wording can be on the ballot to its passage.
With my current involvement in legislative matters I probably had the advantage of knowing what was going on with the amendment before I entered the polling place, something many others may not have been aware of. It was for that reason I voted against the amendment because I believe the salary question is best left to the legislators themselves because they are accountable to the voters.
From a personal perspective, when I chose to run for the House I did it in the name of public service, so knew what the pay was, and accepted the reality that the position was not solely about being compensated for my time or expertise. I’d also thought would be less than candid to tell anyone who is considering pursuing the office there is a significant cost of leaving your job or business, because for the time you are gone someone else needs to pick up that responsibly, so pay needs to be considered not only for yourself, but the employer or business you are impacting.
There is no doubt Legislature pay will always be a difficult issue to resolve and is most likely the reason it was last increased back in 1999, when it was raised from $29,657 a year to its current level of $31,100. So, it seems the best approach may be to try to strike a balance between setting pay so low it can be a deterrent to service, and setting it so high it attracts people to become career politicians. That balance will always be hard to achieve, but as can be seen from what is happening now, even a constitutional amendment to avoid controversy can sometimes create more of it, rather than prevent it.
Voters put the Legislative Salary Council in charge of determining what dollar amount legislators should be paid and the commission responded. We will now have to wait to see what the long-term ramifications are, but it seems we have not heard the last of this issue.
Sincerely,
Bob