What Was Omitted from the Special Advisory Commission Report on Public Officials’ Pay

Data left out of the report of the Special Advisory Commission Regarding the Compensation of Public Officials

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On November 30, 2014, the Special Advisory Commission Regarding the Compensation of Public Officials published a study concerning the compensation of the state’s constitutional officers and members of the state legislature.

In my view, the information presented in the report is insufficient to allow a meaningful comparison of legislative pay levels in Massachusetts with those of other states because it excludes from its analysis 39 states in total, including six states with populations greater than that of Massachusetts: Texas, Virginia, Georgia, North Carolina, Washington, and Arizona.  The report also excludes eight of the ten states with populations most similar to Massachusetts’: Maryland, Missouri, Tennessee, Indiana, Arizona, Washington, Virginia, and North Carolina.

The special commission caused a stir when it recommended that the annual pay of presiding officers in the Massachusetts House and Senate be hiked from $105,000 to $175,000. Without full information, it is impossible to make a reasoned judgment about how this compares with other states.

For example, the Senate president and speaker earn a lot less in the 10 states most similar in population to Massachusetts.  On average, those states pay their House speakers and Senate presidents $48,331, 28% of what the commission proposed.  Eight of these ten states were excluded from the commissions’ analysis.

The report chooses instead to compare Massachusetts legislative compensation to that of ten other states described in the report as having “full-time legislatures.”  The report does not explain the basis for this designation.  Presumably it is derived from designations made by the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCLS), which many studies of legislative compensation have used. If so, the report’s designation of the Massachusetts legislature as a “full-time” legislature does not comport with its NCSL designation.

The NCSL designates three states as having “full time legislatures” and Massachusetts is not included: California, New York, and Pennsylvania.

The NCLS breaks legislatures into five categories: full time; full time lite, hybrid, part time lite, and part time based largely upon the amount legislators are compensated, the length of legislative sessions, the size of the legislative staff, and other factors.  NCSL puts Massachusetts in the category of a “full time lite” legislature, along with Illinois, Ohio, Wisconsin, New Jersey and Florida.

A comparison of base pay for presiding legislative officers in these seven “full time lite” states shows a wide disparity between what the report recommends be paid to Massachusetts legislative presiding officers and what is paid in the other six states in this category:

Using NCLS designations as the sole basis of comparison of legislative compensation is inherently flawed in my opinion for two reasons.  One is that the NCSL designations rely heavily on the level of compensation currently being paid to legislators in a state; i.e., if the legislators are being paid a lot, it is an indication that the state has a full-time legislature. Thus it is a kind of self-fulfilling designation. The other is that it relies on the statutorily authorized length of legislative sessions.  This is flawed because it does not compare how many actual days a state legislature meets during the statutorily allowed period.

A report published by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting (NECIR) found that from January 2011 through the end of March, 2013 the Massachusetts House of Representatives met in floor session for an equivalent of 69 8-hour days, while the Senate met for 43 8-hour days, according to information compiled by NECIR from legislative journals. On more than half the days they met, legislators were in session for less than a half an hour.

There is no data currently available that I could find after great effort to compare how many hours or days of legislative sessions, or hearings, take place in the various states on an annual or biannual basis.

I formerly served as a member of the Massachusetts House from 1975 to 1992.  I know from personal experience that a legislator spends a lot more time at his or her job than attending legislative sessions and hearings.  Legislators respond to constituent requests, research public policy issues, attend many meetings with individuals and groups in the legislative district and beyond, and campaign for reelection.  I also assume, however, that state legislators across the country do the same.  For this reason, I feel that the report of the Special Advisory Commission did not do an adequate job of presenting objective data to allow legislators and the general public to make judgments about comparative legislative compensation notwithstanding elusive characterizations of full or part time status.  I think that the Commission would have better served the public by presenting a broader set of data.

Three resources are readily available to provide such data.

The spreadsheets below come from three sources. One source is a study conducted by the independent Hay Group entitled Compensation Review for Members of the General Assembly of the State of South Carolina January 2013.  It includes the 2012 base pay of state legislators and additional pay of legislative leaders in all fifty states, including presiding officers, majority and minority leaders, and other high ranking legislators.  The other source is the National Conference of State Legislatures – 2013 Legislator Compensation report that includes the base pay of legislators in all fifty states.  In addition, I am also providing data from the National Conference of State Legislatures – Size of Legislative Staff report about full-time and session-only legislative staff in all fifty states in 2009, the most recent data available that I could find.

Pioneer institute is dedicated to providing impartial, data-driven public policy analysis to state leaders and the general public.  In order to do so in this case, Pioneer is making this data available today.