Idaho Secretary of State candidate Holli Woodings is calling on her GOP opponent, former House Speaker Lawerence Denney, to give up his state pension, in light of his comments at a live debate last week that he doesn’t believe elected officials should be on the state pension system. “If we want a fair and honest person as our next secretary of state, that person should be willing to live under the same rules he or she wants everybody else to live under,” Woodings declared.

Denney didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment on Woodings’ challenge, which she made in a news release distributed to news media statewide. During last week’s debate, he repeatedly called for removing all elected officials from the Public Employee Retirement System of Idaho. But he also suggested they should get some other type of retirement compensation to offset that. “I think that if you remove the retirement portion totally from all legislators, if you remove that retirement portion from all elected officials and give them the compensation so that they could put it in their own 401K or whatever, I think we could do that and do it very painlessly,” he said.

Under a special provision, longtime Idaho lawmakers who take high-paying state jobs at the end of their careers qualify for full retirement pensions as if they’d been full-time state employees all those years. When legislation was proposed in 2012 to do away with that perk for lawmakers, Denney, then speaker of the House, killed the bill. Under the provision, his state pension would jump from roughly $500 a month to roughly $3,600 a month for life if he wins the election and serves one four-year term as secretary of state. You can read my full story here at spokesman.com.