There’s what’s legal, and there’s what’s right. Could lawmakers legally let a recommended 10% boost in salaries go into effect for state legislators, judges and the executive branch?
Certainly: The state Commission of Salaries recommended them, and if the Legislature does nothing to stop them, they’ll be in place. That’s how the state Constitution frames it.
So far, the state House has done the right thing, Opens in a new tab on Thursday passing Senate Bill 1350, sending a proposed hold on pay raises back to the Senate for its agreement. The measure had been amended April 7 by the House Finance Committee to contain new language, deferring the commission’s recommended 10% raises through the end of 2022.
This means that the raises would be suspended until the start of 2023, when they’d finally go to lawmakers then in office. The salary bumps also then would go to the governor, lieutenant governor, judges, administrative directors or their equivalents statewide, and the Cabinet and executive officers and their deputies or assistants across state agencies.
One hopes that we’ll all be in a better place and time by then. Surely it would be unseemly to accept a pay raise July 1 as scheduled, with many businesses expecting a struggle for months or years ahead, and many people dealing with a drastic economic disruption in their own lives.
At least, taxpayers can hope all legislators would see that as unseemly. The bill, a measure previously dealing with unrelated issues around reapportionment, now must be approved by the Senate.
At this point in the session, there’s a lot of dealmaking that goes on, in and out of conference committees, and things are known to slip between some enormous cracks in all of the proceedings.
And the public likely won’t forget that this was a year when, yet again, a proposed increase in the minimum wage got hung up.
Of course, it would be a tough time for businesses now to shoulder a boost in the minimum, in any case, Even so, it’s still wrong for the top brass in state leadership to expect their pay packets to fatten in the interim.
Ideally, approving pay raises would require an affirmative vote by lawmakers, instead of a commission plan taking effect by default. Correcting that would take a state constitutional amendment, a heavy lift — but attempts should be made.
For the present, this kind of temporary fix will do. Senators, everyone’s watching and waiting: Vote to defer your raises.
