Legislator pay: baseball it ain't.

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 you pay for. And $46,410 is manifestly too low when you consider that we collectively are charged with writing a $17 billion budget and passing laws that affect all the citizens of the commonwealth."

The legislature rejected the measure, and the coalition was unsuccessful in getting the 10,000 additional certified signatures necessary to put the issue on the ballot.

WHAT'S A LEGISLATOR WORTH?

Some of the issues that make raising pay for legislators so difficult are conflicting ideas on public service, the inability to measure performance in the same way that the private sector and government agencies do, and the lack of comparable jobs.

Sometimes this means that legislators will go for years without a raise. The last time Louisiana legislators received a pay increase - their salary is $16,800 a year and $75 a day for the three months they are in session - was 1980. In Arizona, lawmakers have been earning $15,000 a year and $35 a day for their 120-day session for 16 years. Until they raised their salary to $30,000 in this legislative session (to go into effect in 1999), Colorado lawmakers made $17,500 a year since 1985. That was also the last year legislators in Mississippi and Nevada got a raise. The annual salary in Mississippi is $10,000 plus $94 a day for three months' work. In Nevada, it's $130 a day for 60 days every other year. Other states are more successful in defusing the political pay raise bomb by using commissions to recommend salary increases (See story on Page 26).

"Ideally, I'd like to see legislative compensation increased annually," says Hoyt Doyle, president of Effective Compensation Inc. "But I think the issue is: Which is more politically palatable, to have a little bit of pain every year or to have big pain every decade? It probably depends on how the political winds are blowing."

Past salary studies comparing legislators to business executives with similar responsibilities always find that legislators are woefully undercompensated, according to Alan Rosenthal of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University.

"But I'm not sure you can set that as a standard because I think the public sector has got to be very different. But lawmakers are not compensated adequately for the time they give to the job and for the sacrifices they make in terms of outside income and careers," Rosenthal says.

So what is reasonable pay for a legislator?

Lawmakers, compensation experts and political observers believe it is a salary that attracts diverse candidates with varied professional experience, allows the broad middle class of people who work for a living to serve and is at a level comfortable for an "educated" citizenry. It balances need with constituent tolerance and that will be different for every state.

Presently, states try to get at the issue of reasonable pay in a number of ways: through compensation commissions, whose value and effectiveness varies; through constitutional amendments, which are almost never successful; and through direct votes of the legislature, which can provoke the kind of negative media coverage and public sentiment seen in Massachusetts.

OTHER WAYS TO DETERMINE PAY

But there may be merit in looking at some new ideas for determining how much we pay legislators and why.

Hoyt Doyle, who helps private sector companies establish compensation levels for their employees, as well as assisting the National Conference of State Legislatures in studying compensation and pay for legislative employees, believes there can be different approaches to setting legislators' pay beyond what is presently done. But each has its own inherent problem.

* Set the salary at the 70th percentile or 20 percent above the median salary for the state.

This would ensure that the broad middle class would be able to run for office. For example, if the average wage in a state is $30,000, then 70 percent of the people are probably making less than $45,000. By paying lawmakers $45,000, the vast majority of people in the state would be able to serve in the legislature without sacrificing a livable wage.

* Establish an automatic index: cost of living, constituent wages, executive branch wages or federal employee wages.

Automatic indexing takes lawmakers' wage increases out of the political area. But indexing also has inherent problems. Most citizens don't have cost of living protections built into their jobs. Indexing legislative wages to constituent wages might make sense, but would it make low-paying industries less attractive or encourage unionization or other activities that might not be desirable from the constituents' viewpoint?

* Set similar wages for similar states.

This is perhaps the most practical approach to setting legislators' salaries. Large, industrial states and states with high-tech industries with full-time legislatures would pay lawmakers comparable wages. States with smaller populations, lower budgets and part-time legislatures would have similar legislative salaries. But this approach doesn't take states' varying political and economic cultures into account and asks lawmakers to abdicate any authority for setting their own salaries.

* Tie lawmakers' salaries to executive branch salaries.

They're all government employees, so doesn't it make sense to use executive branch employees as the yardstick for legislators? It certainly could, but in some states that want to keep legislative salaries down, this approach could have a corrupting influence on the salaries of state employees. Additionally, in the executive branch, it's easier to find comparable jobs in industry and therefore easier to identify when state employees fall behind the market.

* Set the salary at the level of pay for corporate board members in the state.

An intriguing idea for setting legislators' compensation, it recognizes that the skills of legislators are most closely matched in the corporate world to the skills required of board members. But there are difficulties with this concept too. Although legislatures and boards make group decisions, their roles are essentially different. In business, the CEO determines the direction of the company; the board ensures the company doesn't take the wrong direction. Although legislatures may be viewed as the board of directors for the states, the job of legislating is a proactive one. Lawmakers generally set the direction for the state and the executive implements it.

The typical board member in the United States makes between $20,000 and $50,000 a year, but it can go as high as $100,000. A state could choose a corporation that mirrors certain aspects of the state - customers of the company and citizens of the state; gross revenues of the corporation and the budget of the state; employees of the company and employees of the state - to determine which board's salary would be used as the basis for legislators' pay.

Still, salary is only one part of the compensation equation.

"People run for office for reasons other than compensation," says former Michigan House Speaker Paul Hillegonds, now president of Detroit Renaissance. "I think most people run with some level of idealism - to leave the state and community better for their children than they found it. Why do people teach or go into the ministry? I think it's very much the same thing. They're not particularly well-paying jobs relative to the abilities of the people going into those fields, but it's the same kind of call to service."

SOME DO MAKE A LIVING WAGE

Michigan, with a full-time legislature, pays its lawmakers close to $60,000, including per diem expenses. That money attracts people of high caliber with diverse backgrounds and experience. Still, Hillegonds believes, people who give up jobs in the private sector for six or more years in the legislature ultimately lose out economically.

"It's not like legislators in Michigan can easily jump from jobs where they're paid $50,000-plus a year into jobs that pay much higher than that. But the sacrifice involved there is that many legislators have forgone the career track that would allow them, with the abilities they have, to make more money had they never gotten into the legislature."

That is equally true in California, New York, Pennsylvania and other states where the compensation is high. But it is in the smaller states with part-time legislatures where the problem is particularly difficult.

In Oregon, where legislators make $13,104 a year and $87 a day for six months' work every other year, former Speaker Larry Campbell says: "I don't think Americans want everyone who represents them to be millionaires or people who can meet their own financial requirements without help. I don't think they necessarily want their legislatures to be made up of nothing but retirees. There's a place for both millionaires and retirees, but there's a place for a lot of folks who don't fall into those two categories - and many of those folks basically would be demonstrating poor judgment to go into the process at what they would be paid right now."

Says Rosenthal: "I think there is that understanding that public service is at a different level of pay. There's also an understanding that when you're in public service there's a different level Of scrutiny. Your ethics come under much greater scrutiny, you're held to much different standards and I think you're expected to be compensated less. I think that's a general expectation on the part of the public. I personally can live with that because legislators are getting other benefits - mainly gratification. I think it's reasonable for public officials to be paid less. But I don't think it's reasonable for public officials in New Hampshire to be paid $100 a year. I don't think it's reasonable for public officials in New Mexico to be paid nothing but per diem expenses. That's totally unreasonable."

Campbell adds: "I've jokingly said that in Oregon we should put an initiative on the ballot that says, 'Don't pay those legislators too much. Cap their salary at $50,000.' And my guess is that everybody would vote for that not recognizing that their salaries are slightly over $13,000."

"You can't pay people minimum wage and expect them to handle multi-million dollar budgets. The kind of job a legislator does is very much like the job of a combined manager, technician and spokesman or communicator for any business. You probably will never be able to pay legislators what I consider they're worth, but they at least should receive a comparable income to a middle management position," Campbell says.

But what are comparable jobs? Do they exist outside government? Are legislative skills easily transferable to the private sector?

"I think the skills of legislators are mainly what you might call political," Rosenthal says. "The skills are being able to handle a lot of subjects at one time, being able to operate under pressure, being able to operate in an environment in which you're always dependent on somebody else and always seeking a consensus. I think what legislators don't have - or what's commonly believed they don't have - is managerial skills because they don't usually manage anything. I don't think that many of them find their way into private sector employment of a significant nature."

Establishing pay levels in the private sector for jobs is fairly easy. You go out into the market and see what everyone else is paying for the same job. In the legislature, it's not that simple because there really is no other comparable job.

"Nobody in business gets to decide on the death penalty," says Doyle, drawing on the essential difference between the private sector and government work.

"Because the legislative job is a group decision-making process and proactive and it gets involved in issues that are of much more social consequence than you find in corporate America, I don't see a good way to match it to any jobs on the corporate side."

In fact, it is difficult to peg the work a legislator does to a comparable job in the private sector - unless, of course, that person had developed business or legal skills before coming into the legislature. In that case, lawmakers are honing the skills they already have and adding new ones.

BUSINESS AND POLITICS ARE DIFFERENT

Negative campaigns and media coverage are certainly two reasons raising legislators' pay is difficult. But the inability of the public to compare the job of a legislator to a private sector position is another reason. Negotiating, building consensus, making group decisions are often the antithesis of what makes a business person successful - being decisive, working independently, managing large numbers of people.

"I think business views the public sector like they view garbage collection - necessary but messy," says Rosenthal. But there's not a direct correlation that the public can see between government and business.

"There's a political aspect to business management, but I don't think business regards the legislature as serious management," says Rosenthal.

Nevertheless, lawmakers do leave the legislature and go into business. But often they are going back to the businesses they left or are choosing careers that naturally build upon legislative experience-lobbying jobs or associations or nonprofit organizations where the decision-making process is collaborative.

"You can be very successful in politics, but that doesn't necessarily mean you'll be very successful when you leave politics and try to run a lobbying organization or association or become CEO of a business," says Doyle. "But the key is a lot of businesses do value the skills people learn in the legislature and the contacts people develop in elected office."

Paul Hillegonds agrees.

"The problem for legislators is that if you stay in office for a long time, you don't come out with a specific set of technical skills. You're not really a manager, you're not really a lawyer, even if you have a law degree. You're a generalist. And so other than the expertise in government - which is certainly good for public relations or interest group advocacy or for the skills you bring as a professional lobbyist - after you've been in the legislature a long time, it's not easy to transfer back into the private sector, in my opinion."

Without any private sector experience at all, however, he did it. An 18-year veteran of the Michigan House who spent four years as speaker and now a congressional aide right out of college, he is president of Detroit Renaissance, a coalition of businesses dedicated to revitalizing the city. He says his political skills got him the job.

Hillegonds, Rosenthal, Campbell and Doyle all agree that legislators themselves need to take responsibility for their own pay.

"You have to take the political heat to set the salary at an appropriate level," says Campbell. "The fact that you put salaries at a respectable level will not un-elect you." Campbell believes that lawmakers should then chose an index to automatically increase salaries.

In Michigan the State Officers' Compensation Commission meets after the general election every two years to recommend pay increases. The new legislature has 30 days in which to turn down the recommendations, otherwise they automatically go into effect.

"So under today's system in Michigan, you have a new legislature voting on their own salaries for the next two years without the voters weighing in," Hillegonds says. He supports a constitutional amendment paralleling the Madison amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1992 when Michigan became the last state to approve it, which prohibits members from voting on a salary level during their term of office.

"In other words, I'd like to see a vote by the Legislature for the salary levels that go into effect after the next election. So that the vote cast is one that could affect your election," Hillegonds says.

Doyle says the reason to pay a decent salary to legislators is "to allow people to run who would otherwise not be able to. That's just a cost of democracy. If you really want to make public service available to people, you have to put your money where your mouth is."

Says Rosenthal: "I think legislators ought to raise their pay themselves. They ought to raise their pay, they ought to explain it to the public and they ought to live with the results. Because I think it's very important that the public get the idea that legislators deserve more money - it's just right - and that the legislature stand up for it.

"They can use blue ribbon study groups and commissions and citizen task forces to help them make recommendations, but I think they ought to take the responsibility."

IMMEDIATE OPENING: STATE LEGISLATOR

Seeking a skilled and energetic candidate. Qualified candidates will have superior people skills and the ability to solve multiple problems for constituencies up to 300,000 people. Must be skilled in negotiating and building consensus, working with diverse people and problems, recommending and passing the laws of the state, serving on multiple committees, understanding multifaceted, billion-dollar-plus budgets. Successful candidate will have the ability to raise money to fund the next campaign. The job offers intellectual challenge, personal and professional growth and the opportunity to serve your state.

Salary: $100 to $75,000 per year, depending on location.

Karen Hansen is editor of State Legislatures.