The Kansas Senate approved a bill last week creating a Legislative Compensation Commission to make recommendations about raising lawmakers’ salaries. The concern is that low pay is keeping many Kansans from serving in the Legislature. Lawmakers do put in long hours for relatively modest salaries — base pay for a rank-and-file legislator is $23,035. But it would take a major salary increase to make the job economically appealing to many professionals. And rather than attracting higher-caliber candidates to run for public office, would we just end up with higher paid ideologues?
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
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10 Comments
Yes! Although don’t pay them too much or you just get the opportunist career politican like what we have with US Representatives and Senators.
The only people who are state reps in Kansas are retirees, real estate agents, divorce/DUI lawyers, and bored house wives.
Old story: I was going to computer programming school, had three kids all under seven y.o., my wife working full time and the only income in the family. I was offered a job at the school, minim wage with the promise that it would lead to a higher paying job within the year. I took the job which meant that the children had to be put in daycare. 300 hundred dollars a month, total take home from the job was four hundred a month. We were receiving 300 hundred a month in food stamps while I was in school.Shortly after starting work, we received a letter from the state saying we were no longer eligible for the food stamp program as I was making too much. simple math: four hundred a month in income, three hundred a month childcare, loss of three hundred a month in food stamps = four hundred -six hundred.
At the same time the U.S. Congress voted themselves a pay raise from eighty thousand a year to one hundred and forty thousand a year. The reason given, they just could not live on eighty thousand a year.
The point: Government service should not be a life time job, it should be an honor. Nor should those in Government prosper when those that they serve suffer losses at their hands. If there is an employer that has a worker that focuses mainly on playboy and not on making the company better off. At the end of the day, should that worker get a raise? Porn shop bill boards, abortion clinics, gay marriage, gay adoption, the legal age that one can marry. All have more attention in Topeka that school finance and they had to be forced to focus on it.
I think more than the salary problem is the time problem. Right now, the salary isn’t enough to support someone as a full-time job, yet if one is a full-time worker, you don’t have time to do the job.
The only thing that would give us higher quality elected officials would be…
…higher quality voters!
You know, the ones that read and think and cast informed votes. You know, the voters that make up their own minds regardless of what their masters say.
Read this blog, and you will know how much of a chance we have of “informed” votes being cast in Kansas!!!!!
NO!! the state reps should not even be thinking about a pay increase during budget shortfalls.
A better idea would be to pass a law that would allow them to still be paid a certain percentage, or all, of pay from their regular jobs if they are not self-employed.
Used to be that Republicans wanted elected officials to work without pay and Democrats wanted elected officials to get “full” pay, whatever that was.
However, now pay for political offices seems to be a patchwork of pay and perks.
In Wichita for example … school board members do not receive pay even though their meetings often last some six hours on alternate Monday evenings plus many extra special meetings. And I believe the “free service” by school board members is a state-wide tradition for all school boards including members of the Kansas Board of Education. Someone please correct me if I am wrong on this.
Kansas legislators, I believe, are paid some $13,000 per legislative session of some four months plus other pay for travel, extra days, retirement fund, and many dinners with desserts and toppings while in Topeka. As one who has watched the Kansas legislature in action for a number of years, I now wonder if more of the legislators work could be done at home by computers/e-mail somehow?
Wichita city councilmen are paid some $35,000/year, more for the mayor, plus perks, presumably health insurance and possibly retirement. And this is for part-time work. Of course, most councilpeople will tell you their time is worth more than that.
Sedgwick County Commissioners are each paid some $65,000/year plus additional pay for other county boards on which they serve, plus the usual perks, health insurance, retirement … and snacks.
We could adopt a policy of “contribute according to your ability, and receive pay according to your needs.” But that was the socialists’ rule.
Sorry. I meant to say $23,000/year for state legislators according to the EAGLE’s editorial.
Politicians will run for office, regardless of the pay level. 23 grand for a part time job, along with various perks and benefits sounds reasonable to me.
The last thing we need is a full time, ‘professional’ legislature like California has. We do not need people passing laws all year long!!
The implied threat of impeachment and the occasional assassination would really go a long way to having a positive impact on our elected officials!
Viva La Raza Blanco!!
Wink,We do want to pay a reasonable living wage to our legislators; we don’t want a statehouse full of independently wealthy snobs, or idiots who couldn’t get a decent job in the private sector either. Although, maybe the best way to give them a raise is the same way theb rest of us get one- make them earn it!