The Commission brought up in June the idea of increasing
the members’ salaries $6,000 to $28,000 annually, and additionally other
benefits. This pay is almost three times the figure commissioners made when I
ran for the body 18 years ago (and pledged not to take a salary) – and it doesn’t
include per diem expenses for travel
to meeting and other trips they may take.
Their pay has crept higher because parish ordinance ties their pay to
cost-of-living increases granted to all parish employees – a nifty incentive for
steadily rising income for all concerned. And made much more possible over the
past few years with the growing, and some retrenching, Haynesville Shale production,
the continuing royalty payments from which have enabled the parish to be quite
generous in this and other ways.
An additional boost on top of the automatic adjustments would only kick
in after new terms began in 2016. Nevertheless, most of the Commission will not
hit term limits by then -- perhaps none at all pending a vote also on Saturday to extend them -- and in flush times it’s tough to knock off an incumbent,
so it’s reasonable that the 10 eligible will want to get and succeed in getting
reelected (in Bowman’s case, his initial election) and enjoy the $500 monthly
boost.
But even $22,000 a year is an absurdly high level for a part-time job
in a position relatively so picayune. Given the parish’s latest comprehensive
annual financial report at this time of publication, they show the present
salary represents 0.0228 percent of all parish expenditures (almost $96.5
million). Then compare it to the other two large government entities in the
parish that also employ part-time elected legislators – Shreveport, which pays $8,400
a year so to councilors on expenditures of $257
million yielding a figure of 0.00327 percent, and the Caddo Parish School
District, which pays its school board representatives $9,600 a year on
expenditures of over $496
million yielding a figure of 0.00193 percent. In other words, for a
government almost a third of the size of Shreveport and a fifth the size of
Caddo schools, commissioners got paid relatively speaking seven times and almost
12 times over what their counterparts, respectively, received.
Keep in mind this applies to a job that legally is considered
part-time. Charter authors were wise to conceive of the jobs in such terms because
it increases the chances of getting commissioners that are part of a household,
as with most of their constituents, who must work in professions in the
community that will connect them to their constituents. Granting a full-time
salary to people whose only job then is to spend other people’s money forcibly
collected only encourages expansion of government as they become more insulated
from those from whom they take the resources to support themselves.
There may be those among the commissioners who would argue that, given
the scope of their duties, that they deserve a full-time salary for all that they
do. To which there are two appropriate answers, firstly that if they feel they
are not being compensated enough for what they do, then they are free to resign
their position rather than dip their snouts further into the trough. Nobody put
a gun to their heads and said they have to work at this amount; they chose this
entirely voluntarily when they ran. No doubt there are individuals in the
community that are as capable or even more talented than any current commissioner
that feels this way who would be glad to work for the present remuneration, if
not less. Salaries for the Shreveport City Council and Caddo Parish School
Board certainly suggest truth to that.
Secondly, a commissioner would feel this way only because he has
expanded government to fulfill his own desires for power. If one complains
about a part-time job being to him full-time, it is commissioners themselves
who needlessly make it so and then reprehensibly use their own ambition to
justify squeezing more out of the taxpayer to fund their desires. Again, there
are plenty of civic-minded individuals out there – the vast majority of whom
probably do not pursue the job because they don’t want to put up with the
hassle of campaigning – who will perform the job, whether they self-expand its
duties without demanding more compensation.
And that is the worst consequence of paying the officeholder as if it
were a full-time job, the higher pay dangling as a reward. That escalates
campaign expenditures and rhetoric and attracts people who have more incentives
to being committed to keeping themselves in office to keep the gravy train
rolling than to make difficult and/or wise decisions on behalf of the weal.
Among the worst of these implications is that government continues to expand
beyond its legitimate purpose and to enrich those who live off of it because that
enables reelection. It’s not a raise they need, but instead a cap on what they
make, and at a much lower level.
Even if this turns out to be delayed as a political tactic pending that vote whether to lengthen commissioner term limits to five. If it passes this could be a prelude to
coming back next year with the pay raise.
No comments:
Post a Comment