Legislators can get a raise if they simply do nothing

You may be paying more for the salaries of Hawaii’s executive class next year because the state salaries are expected to increase.

Precisely how much could come at this morning’s meeting of the Commission on Salaries, which is scheduled to discuss its final report on the salaries for legislators, the governor and his Cabinet, and state judges.

The state Constitution created the seven-person state salary commission, which is to meet every six years. The current one has been meeting since late 2012 to examine state executive and judicial pay rates.

Right now legislators receive $46,272 a year. Although their official duties only require a 60-day legislative session, their actual duties encompass an almost daily calendar of public appearances, constituent consolations and an unending round of glad-handing.

Under the existing rules left over from the 2007 salary commission, legislators’ salaries go to $55,896 on July 1 and then to $57,852 on Jan. 1, 2014.

So by the beginning of next year, lawmakers will have seen their salary increase 25 percent, without the benefit of this year’s salary commission handiwork.

Also during the session, outer island lawmakers get $150 a day for living expenses. All lawmakers also get $5,000 a year for miscellaneous legislative expenses.

Because the 2007 pay raise came during the national recession, lawmakers felt that it wouldn’t look right for them to get a pay raise when other state workers were seeing furloughs and pay cuts, so the Legislature ordered its own round of 5 percent pay cuts.

In a preliminary draft, the salary commission indicated that it would at least restore all salaries to the recommendations of the 2007 commission.

Earlier this year, the Abercrombie administration made a pitch to the commission to think how its recommendations would be taken by the state public employees who are starting their own labor negotiations.

"They requested that the commission consider the state’s budget challenges and the fiscal constraints on public employee bargaining when making their decisions," the draft report stated.

Although the salary commission is keeping mum about what it is likely to do, the indications are for some sort of a raise, because in the examination of legislative, executive and judicial salaries, the draft report recommends an unspecified increase. The extra amount may be filled in at today’s meeting.

The commission was set up with a sweet fail-safe mechanism. After the commission submits the report to the Legislature, if the lawmakers want to reject their increase, the Legislature must actively pass a resolution stating none of the pay raises should take effect.

So if lawmakers don’t want to take a pay raise, they also have to kill the recommendations for the executive branch and the judges as well.

While a salary of $57,852 may be seen by some as already generous, many legislators are privately saying they are anxious for another round of salary increases.

To get them, all they have to do is sit on their hands until adjournment in early May.

It is the sort of logic that must be intuitive only to the Legislature because you get rewarded for doing nothing.

———

Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Reach him at rborreca@staradvertiser.com.