IT’S ABOUT TIME

The 121st Maine Legislature has yet to be elected and it won’t take office for another six months, yet it already has set a record: 54 candidates have dropped out after being nominated by their parties at the June primaries. After all, dubious records count, too.

Dropouts are nothing new – in a typical election, 30 or so candidates for the 186-seat body bail out between the primaries and the mid-July general-election ballot deadline. Some simply change their minds, many never intended to run but were merely reserving a place on the ballot while their parties enlisted a committed candidate. The extraordinarily high number this year raises the question of why. A common answer is money.

Legislative pay has been stuck at $18,000 for the two-year term since 1990. That’s a long stretch without a raise and not enough anyway for roughly six months’ work in the long session and four in the short. It certainly creates a condition in which public service is unaffordable to many who might have something to offer the public. Yet the last substantial effort, in 1999, to increase pay – to $27,000 for the two years, plus increases in constituent allowances – was killed as soon as opponents played the “voting themselves a 50 percent pay raise” card. In that poisonous atmosphere, not even an entirely sensible and modest 3 percent boost followed by annual cost-of-living increases could survive.

Part of the answer to the dropout problem – and to the even more troubling problem of uncontested seats (28 this year) – may well be increasing pay to something that at least resembles adequate monetary compensation for the use of other people’s time. But if lawmakers cannot have a civil discussion on this matter during the height of an economic boom, it is unlikely to go any better during a bust.

Maybe it’s time to look at the other side of the compensation equation – time. That is, shorter sessions with less legislation. Maybe $18,000 for sessions of, say, four months for the first session and two for the second might be not only more attractive to candidates but also would make continuing to hold down a regular job more feasible.

This would require substantial reform of the way the Legislature does business, but it is reform long overdue. When the number of submitted bills cracked the 2,000 mark in the last Legislature, many said it was a fluke caused by the number of newcomers wrought by term limits. This Legislature cracked 2,500 – excessive legislating is no fluke.

Lawmakers always will have the constitutional right to submit as much legislation as they desire, so cutting back will have to be voluntary. Individual legislators will have to say “no” to constituents with pet projects; legislative leadership will have to strongly suggest “no” to those who can’t. The Legislative Council must take a much firmer stand on after-deadline bills, future governors must reserve their use of after-deadline powers for true emergencies, everyone at least could agree that the constitutional limits on the subjects taken up in the second session must be observed.

This will take extraordinary cooperation and discipline, but these are extraordinary times. All current office-holders agree that the budget crisis will require the next Legislature and next governor to undertake fundamental overhaul of Maine’s haphazard spending and taxation policies. It might even occur to them that there’s a connection between haphazard policies and the process that produces them.