There was pretty hot debate in the House State Affairs Committee this morning on HB 444, Rep. Dennis Lake's bill to repeal a 1990 law that allows longtime state legislators who take higher-paying state jobs late in their careers to count all their legislative service as if they were in full-time state jobs the whole time; the difference for a longtime lawmaker who then serves four years in a top state post is a jump from around $350 a month to about $1,700 a month. In the end, the committee voted 14-5 to hold the bill at the call of the chair to get more information.

Rep. Brent Crane, R-Nampa, said the Idaho Constitution says lawmakers can't set their own compensation and that's left to an independent committee; he moved to hold the bill in committee. If lawmakers vote on such issues, he said, "It's going to be a political football, and I can guarantee you it's going to be a race to the bottom."

The bill would treat lawmakers' service as part-time for retirement purposes; it grandfathers in anyone who leaves the Legislature before July 1, 2012.

Crane said, "You can ask my wife, you can ask my family, you can ask my constituents - this is not a part-time job for me." Rep. Erik Simpson, R-Idaho Falls, who backed Crane's motion, said "Bills like this really just chip away at the edges, it's the beginning of the end, quite honestly." He said some want to cut lawmakers' already modest pay of just over $16,000 a year, eliminate all their benefits including retirement and health coverage, and cut back their expense reimbursement. "You can't eliminate all incentives to be here or ... you're going to get wealthy and you're going to get retired people and that's it. ... I don't think that's an adequate representation of the state of Idaho."

Rep. Eric Anderson, R-Priest Lake, said he looked into why the 1990 law was passed, and in part, it was aimed at a trend toward state jobs going only to Treasure Valley-area legislators, because those from far off couldn't afford to relocate. "It was ... an incentive to keep our great geography of the state back to the center where everybody could participate," he said. "There was a reasoning for doing this."

Anderson, like Crane, said he works full-time as a legislator. "I don't know anybody here that's overpaid," he said. "Some work a lot more than others ... but that's just the way it is," he said. "I may not be overpaid at $16,000, but it doesn't change the fact that I work full-time."

Lake said, "I think it's a pretty tough argument to make that we, making $16,000 a year, are full-time employees. We may think we are full-time employees and some of us may work like full-time employees," but he said "the fact is" that the pay doesn't merit that definition.
 

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