Matter of timing

It’s been nine years since the Maine Legislature got a raise. In normal situations, such a protracted dry spell would make an increase justified and long overdue.

This, however, isn’t a normal situation. It’s the Maine Legislature.

The proposal before the State and Local Government Committee today is a textbook case of how not to do something that ought to be done. Few Mainers would deny that compensation should at least keep up with inflation. By failing to give itself reasonable, regular raises for nearly a decade, then putting a 50-percent hike on the table — from $18,000 for the two-year term to $27,000, about nine month’s work altogether — lawmakers have succeeded in turning the logical into the unthinkable. True, it’s hard to juggle the regular job and the legislative duty, constituent work adds up to lots of unpaid hours on the job, a lot of good, smart people simply can’t afford to be in the Legislature, but nobody gets a 50-percent raise all at once.

It’s all in the timing. A leading argument for the raise is that the workload has increased, as one legislator overstated it, exponentially. The workload has increased, no doubt in large measure due to the increasing complexity of the issues. But the time to make that argument is not during a session legislators clogged up with more than 3,000 bills. The absurd number of irrelevant, narrowly targetted bills has been winnowed considerably, but the foul odor of this lack of restraint lingers. The inability of party leadership to keep rank-and-file members focused on the essentials, on the core of the party agenda, hardly engendered public confidence.

More bad timing: Hundreds of Mainers who have lost their jobs making shoes and paper in the last couple of weeks won’t be getting 50-percent raises; the public already is a bit cranky that lawmakers are tinkering with the term-limits law passed by referendum just four years ago; from rethinking a rebuilding of the prison system to disarming newly armed game wardens, the current Legislature seems more interested in backtracking on decisions made by the previous than it is in moving ahead on such vital issues as education funding, meaningful tax reform, transportation and economic development. Again, a matter of leadership.

Unfortunately for the majority of legislators who work hard and do their homework, all this means that a raise essentially retroactive to 1990 is just plain crazy. The Legislature needs a raise, but it probably will have to start from scratch, with 1999 as the base year. Then, Maine needs lawmakers with the foresight to set into place a mechanism for regular, inflation-based increases and the gumption to make a case for a larger, yet rational, increase in the level of compensation. There may come a time when legislative pay will be on par with the working world. Just not this time.