KyKurmudgeon

Excuse the unexplained absence of columns the past couple of Sundays. I decided to take some time off on the spur of the moment, and failed to post a notice about when I would be back. Well, I’m back now. And here’s Sunday’s column:

Kentucky pays its state legislators the same way many farmers pay field hands — as day laborers.

During General Assembly sessions, lawmakers earn a daily base rate of $186 and change seven days a week. Between sessions, they receive the same amount for each day spent attending committee meetings or other authorized legislative functions.

As The Courier-Journal’s Tom Loftus recently reported, House members also can get paid for up to two “Stumbo Days” a month — days spent handling office work in Frankfort — under a new policy implemented by House Speaker Greg Stumbo.

But paying legislators day wages can lead to abuse.

In a recent story on legislative travel by Herald-Leader staffers John Cheves and Linda J. Johnson, Senate President David Williams acknowledged that some legislators may receive extra pay by lengthening official trips.

“The guidelines say you get paid a per diem on your travel days,” Williams said. “Let’s say there’s an opening reception on a Tuesday. They’ll want to travel in on Monday and get paid for the day before the conference starts and then go to a reception the next day.”

Stumbo and Williams are developing a formal travel policy for lawmakers that presumably will address such abuses. But I’m less concerned with how much the General Assembly spends on travel — which Williams correctly noted can be “broadening” for Kentucky legislators — than I am with the state’s flawed approach to paying lawmakers.

Simply put, the job we ask them to do is too important, too demanding, too time-consuming to be treated as day labor.

This isn’t the slow-paced, agrarian 1890s when the state’s legislative needs easily could be handled in a few winter months every other year. Here in the 21st century, annual sessions, special sessions, interim committee meetings, constituent services and other duties consume at least half the time of any lawmaker worthy of the title.

We need to pay legislators a salary commensurate with the demands we place on them. I would start that conversation at $60,000 a year, minimum, with a reasonable built-in cost-of-living increase.

Since salaried legislators wouldn’t be able to pad their pay by adding extra days to official trips, they might shorten their trips (and reduce the attendant cost of lodging and food) in the future.

In the long run, though, the most important argument for paying decent legislative salaries is that it would help diversify the General Assembly by making the job of legislator more attractive to a wider variety of Kentuckians, including some who may now feel they can’t serve without giving up too much of their private sector earning power.

Adages become adages because they contain kernels of truth. We really do get what we pay for. If we want better lawmakers passing better laws, we need to offer them better salaries.

Paying lawmakers day wages isn’t the only flawed aspect of their compensation package. The rules regarding the expenses they receive during sessions are just plain unfair.

Each lawmaker gets a standard daily expense payment, currently $119.90, in addition to their pay. This, too, covers seven days a week during sessions.

For lawmakers from Western Kentucky and Eastern Kentucky who have to pay for lodging and meals while in Frankfort, that amount or more is justified.

But many lawmakers from the central part of the state commute to the Capitol on a daily basis. They sleep in their own homes, and eat many of their meals there as well. For them, much of that $119.90 amounts to supplemental pay, a windfall that legislators from the far ends of the state don’t get.

Between sessions, legislators have to submit vouchers justifying expenses. That’s more fair. And if it works for most of the year, it can work during sessions just as easily.