Lawmakers scheduled for cost-of-living raise
HARRISBURG – Even as lawmakers repeal the controversial pay raise, they will still get a salary increase starting next month because they have kept annual, automatic cost-of-living increases. The exact amount of the increase will not become available until mid- November, when new federal rates are tabulated. But as has occurred over the past 10 years – and reinforced in current versions of the pay raise repeal – lawmakers are set to receive a salary increase based on the federal consumer price index for urbanized areas in the Mid-Atlantic states.
The 2005 increase was 5.2 percent.
Asked whether the COLA increase would take effect starting with the Dec. 1 payroll, Senate Chief Clerk W. Russell Faber said, “I would anticipate that it would be.”
The COLA raise will be off a base salary of $69,647, which lawmakers had been receiving at the beginning of this year.
Also, lawmakers have recently received hikes in per diem reimbursements for each day spent in Harrisburg, from $129 to $141, and mileage reimbursements from 40.5 cents to 48.5 cents per mile for travel, based on Internal Revenue Service rates.
Faber noted that some lawmakers may take a different federal per diem rate of $121 because that index is sometimes higher for out-of-state travel.
Pay raise critics say the automatic COLAs should be done away and replaced with an independent commission that would determine salaries for top government officials, as is done in a few other states.
“We put the Legislature on notice today that this COLA is also a pay raise,” said Gene Stilp, a citizen activist who’s suing the state on the grounds that the pay raise is unconstitutional.
But Steve Miskin, spokesman for House Republican Leader Sam Smith of Jefferson County, said COLAs are not the same as a salary increase and doing away with them are not factoring in on the repeal debate.
“No one’s talking about that,” he said.
Critics claim that COLAs are illegal because the Pennsylvania Constitution calls for salaries to be “fixed” and therefore not adjusted automatically, although the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has ruled otherwise.
Lawmakers argued when passing the last pay raise in 1995 that having an annual COLA adjustment would do away with the need for future legislative pay raises. Since then, COLA adjustments have raised lawmakers’ salaries 48 percent, according to figures provided by the Associated Press.
The pay raise bill allowed for COLA increases or a 50 percent tie to U.S. congressional salaries, whichever was greater.
Tim Potts, co-founder of the government watchdog group Democracy Rising PA, said the COLA rates are too generous, especially considering that the House and Senate recently passed spending caps on state budgets.
He said the inflationary spending caps, based on a three-year consume price index average, could end up being more restrictive than the COLAs lawmakers receive.
“Fire, police, and emergency programs would have to fight with other state-funded services for their share of a 2.2 percent increase” – said Potts, referring to his own calculation – “after our political royalty took their 5.2 percent increase off the top.”
But Tim Storey, a senior fellow at the National Conference of State Legislatures, said linking lawmakers’ salaries to the consumer price index is not uncommon among states because doing so sets the salary issue aside from yearly legislative action.
“It’s such a politically sensitive area, as you in Pennsylvania know,” Storey said.
And what happens to $4 million in extra pay that lawmakers were to receive, before the repeal derailed the 16 to 54 percent salary hike?
House and Senate staff confirmed that the money will remain in legislative coffers, to be used to pay staff and operations, handed out to lawmakers for expenses, or kept in reserve for use in future years. As such, it remains under party leadership control.
“It’s not going back to the General Fund necessarily, simply by repealing the pay raise,” said Al Bowman, policy director for Republican House Appropriations Chairman Brett Feese.
Potts and others who have been fighting a lack of oversight in legislative account spending, said they’re disturbed about how the pay raise money might be used, but that’s an issue for another day.
“We are not unaware of the leadership slush fund,” he said. “But, one battle at a time.”
Alison Hawkes can be reached at 717-705-6330 or ahawkes@calkins-media.com