Jody Richards: Huge Salary Jump Indefensible.

Huge salary jump indefensible
By Jody Richards

As a skilled trial lawyer, Senate President David Williams knows that when the facts are not on your side, you change the subject.

This move is understandable. It is simply not possible to defend a 47 percent raise for a preferred state employee when everyone else must make do with 1 percent in the midst of high inflation, state budget shortfalls and a financial crisis on Wall Street.

The public is outraged that the Senate Republicans led the charge to increase the Legislative Research Commission director's salary by $62,000. Almost 70 percent of state employees do not earn that much money in a year. No wonder that our members are receiving dozens of phone calls from their constituents and that Republican candidates for state office are disavowing their own leadership.

Williams' claim that a $62,000 raise will save the state money is frankly ludicrous.

The LRC director's salary is paid out of the current state budget, which is funded by tax dollars. The state budget is strapped, which is why state employees were limited to a 1 percent raise this year.

Were the LRC director to retire — like thousands of other state employees — his $109,000 in retirement benefits would be paid from the billions in assets held by the Kentucky Retirement Systems for just this purpose.

By allowing the current director to retire, the state will save money because he will no longer accrue additional retirement benefits, and his successor can be brought in at a lower salary.

Raising the director's salary to $195,000 just sets the bar high for the next director whenever he or she is hired. It will be exceedingly difficult to offer a lower salary if this raise is allowed to stand.

Williams' allegations of excessive raises in my own offices are simply not true. The employees in the House Majority Leadership offices received the same 1 percent raises this fiscal year as all other state employees. The raises he references were given in January, long before the state budget was passed, to two part-time hourly employees. One of those employees only works during the first few months of the year, during our legislative sessions. The combined annualized salaries of both wonderful public servants is less than half the salary of the LRC director.

Williams treads into dangerous territory when he starts to compare his total payroll with mine. There are 63 House Democrats and only 21 Senate Republicans. So you would expect the House Democratic payroll to be triple the Senate Republicans'. Yet ours is less than half that amount. The fact is that we in the Democratic House have been responsible stewards of taxpayer dollars. Williams' pursuit of the 47 percent raise for the LRC director shows the same contempt for taxpayers that he showed when his offices were poshly renovated in a manner far and above what was necessary. Let's just say you will not find a $17,000 plasma screen entertainment center in the House leadership offices.

At the end of the day, the issue here is one of fairness. When we were negotiating the pension reform bill, every group of public employees and elected officials sought an exemption from the retirement "window" which is incentivizing thousands of state employees to retire. We refused these requests to be fair to everyone. The 47 percent raise to the LRC director was designed to circumvent this retirement window for a single employee of the legislative branch.

This bald favoritism undermines morale in state government, and it undermines the public trust in our ability to lead. I am against this raise, and I will continue to work to see it overturned.

Editor's note: At issue is the September 26 Herald-Leader article by Jack Brammer, "Big raise for LRC director slammed; House speaker co-sponsor of bill to rescind approval" reported on here.