By Steve Brawner
© 2014 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Let’s start by emphasizing that I was the one who brought up the subject with Rep.-elect Ron McNair, R-Alpena. He did not approach me to complain in print.

The subject is pay for state legislators.

McNair owns an auto shop in Alpena in north Arkansas. He is his only employee. He’s been an unpaid school board member almost 30 years. He narrowly won the Republican primary in May and didn’t face a Democratic opponent, so he’s been driving back and forth to Little Rock at his own expense to get his feet wet before his term actually starts. He will close his shop’s doors at least three months next year while the Legislature is in session. He says he has loyal customers, and he’s worked out arrangements, but that can’t be good for business. He did not know what his legislative salary would be before the election, and he’s still not sure.

That’s because the pay varies member to member. The base pay for House members is $15,869, but legislators also can take advantage of up to $14,000 per year for office expenses they are required to itemize. Some pay themselves rent or pay family members a salary. They also are reimbursed for per diem expenses (lodging and meals) each day they are in Little Rock – $150 per day if they live 50 miles outside the Capitol and $61 if they are closer. They also are reimbursed 56 cents per mile driven. They can be vested in the state’s retirement system if they serve long enough, and they can purchase health insurance like other state employees.

Sounds like a good deal, right? Well, being a legislator is a pretty demanding part-time job involving regular sessions, fiscal sessions, special sessions, interim committee meetings, constituent phone calls and interrupted grocery trips. Many legislators actually do have legitimate office expenses, such as phones. Mileage reimbursements feel like an extra paycheck until you have to replace your worn out tires. Legislators also must stay somewhere when they are in Little Rock. Some pay about $400 a month for rent at the Capitol Hill apartments beside the Capitol.

Sen. Jon Woods, R-Springdale, isn’t sure how much money he makes, either, and he’s been in the Legislature since 2007. During a phone interview, he figured up that his actual take-home pay after expenses is roughly $1,900 a month, but that was kind of a back-of-the-envelope estimate. Being a legislator is his only job; he decided couldn’t serve an employer effectively while also driving back and forth to Little Rock.

Legislators likely are about to get a raise thanks to Amendment 3, passed by voters in November, which included a number of ethics-related provisions. In the past, legislators were responsible for voting for their own pay raises, so they didn’t do it very often. That duty now falls to a citizens commission appointed by legislators, the governor, and the chief justice of the Supreme Court. It will be easier for the commission to raise salaries than it was for the legislators to do so.

Woods, one of Amendment 3’s sponsors, says the current salary structure creates an unnecessary strain on legislators and encourages bad behavior. One behavior, having individual legislators’ meals bought by lobbyists, has been ended by another provision of Amendment 3. Now that legislators are buying their own meals – and they eat out a lot – they’ve effectively received a pay cut.

If legislators were getting rich, there’d be a lot more candidates for office. If they were going broke, they wouldn’t run for re-election. We have in Arkansas a citizen Legislature composed of people who have to pay the bills. It would be best if the salary commission raised base pay while reducing the perks that make it hard to tell who’s making how much. And yeah, legislators should make more money than they do now.

There is the argument that they should be paid nothing, that serving in the Legislature should be just that – a service.

That argument makes sense if all we want in the Legislature are the independently wealthy, the retired, and the dishonest. Which would mean no more laws would be passed by people who own small businesses and fix cars for a living.

By Steve Brawner
© 2014 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

When critical needs aren’t being met, solutions come as a result of two activities: making hard choices and thinking creatively. With prisons, Arkansas has reached the point where it needs to do both.

The state’s prison system is now so full that about 2,500 state convicts are being housed at county jails that were never built for that purpose. The state reimburses counties $28 a day per inmate, the same rate as in 2001, despite counties’ average cost rising to $49 a day. Adding insult to injury, the state doesn’t reimburse counties until the inmate is discharged from jail or moved to the penitentiary. As a result of all this, counties are owed $7.7 million.

County governments, needless to say, are not happy about this. Testifying before four legislative committees Tuesday, Jackson County Sheriff David Lucas, president of the Arkansas Sheriffs Association, said his jail is so full that he’s had to obtain a court order ensuring only violent offenders are locked up. Because of this, nonviolent offenders are no longer paying their fines, and why should they? They know there’s no room in the jail. County voters have approved a tax increase to enlarge the facility, but construction has not begun.

Aware that this can’t continue, the Department of Correction is requesting a new 1,000-bed prison costing in the neighborhood of $100 million. That’s about the same size as the income tax decrease Gov.-elect Asa Hutchinson pledged to enact during the campaign.

Sounds like it’s time for some of those hard choices mentioned in the first paragraph, doesn’t it? Should Arkansas build the prison and forego the tax cut? Should it do both, and cut somewhere else?

Another option – both a hard choice and the result of creative thinking – is to stop sending so many people to prison. Maybe there are better options for offenders who aren’t really threats to society. If the state stopped sending some of these struggling but save-able people to several years of “criminal school” in prison, maybe they wouldn’t become hardened criminals.

Here’s another case of creative thinking. Officials with LaSalle Corrections, a private prison provider based in Louisiana, told legislators Tuesday that they have room right now for 1,000 inmates near the Arkansas border. The cost would be about $28 a day – about what the state is paying as it underfunds counties. They can take them as fast as we can get them there.

It was a compelling case. The state Board of Corrections voted the next day to check into something like that.

Here’s the thing about using the private sector to perform traditional government operations: The private sector really is more efficient in many areas, but it tends to focus on picking low-hanging fruit and leaving the harder cases to the government. LaSalle Corrections does have medical staff at its facilities, but the $28 doesn’t cover big medical costs such as expensive drugs – and some inmates’ needs can be very expensive.

There’s also a philosophical question about the incentives created when imprisoning people becomes a commodity. What happens when corporations backed by lobbyists make more money by imprisoning more people as cheaply as possible? You might get more prisoners than you ought to have, and their needs might not be met – and yes, prisoners have needs. The officials with LaSalle seemed admirably sincere in their desire to help their inmates create better lives, but the state a few years ago tried using a private prison provider – Wackenhut Corrections Corp. – and it did not go well.

Is it worth a second try? It may have to be. Private prisons may be one necessary creative solution. But, as is usually the case when critical needs aren’t being met, hard choices still will have to be made.

By Steve Brawner
© 2014 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

For term limits supporters unhappy about what happened in November, it probably will work out for the best in the long run. Some reforms occurred that likely wouldn’t have happened otherwise, and voters probably will get a chance at a do-over in 2016.

Amendment 3 was a 22-page resolution with many provisions that was shrunk to a single paragraph for the ballot. It prohibits state candidates from accepting campaign contributions from corporations and unions. It prohibits legislators and constitutional officers from accepting gifts from lobbyists, which has already significantly changed the culture at the Capitol. It also increases from one year to two the amount of time that legislators must wait to register as a lobbyist after they leave office – the goal being to reduce the incentive for them to pass laws that would get them hired and help their future employers.

It also created a citizens commission to set salaries for legislators, constitutional officers and judges. In the past, legislators have set their own salaries, a conflict of interest that ironically has kept salaries low because of the awkwardness of it all. Commission members have been appointed by the governor, the leaders of the House and Senate, and the Supreme Court’s chief justice. In other words, they’ve appointed their own salary deciders. The result is that pay hikes probably are coming.

Finally, the amendment extends term limits from the current six years in the House and eight years in the Senate to 16 years total.

Actually, they could serve longer than that. Pages 16 and 17 of the resolution state that partial terms don’t count and that members who reach their 16th year in the middle of their term can finish it out.

The language voters saw on the ballot said the measure was “establishing” term limits. Polled shortly before the election by Talk Business and Hendrix College, 62 percent of respondents said they opposed the measure, while only 23 percent supported it. However, unlike the ballot title, the poll question spelled out that the measure would “extend term limits … to 16 years.”

Term limits supporters fought Amendment 3 before the election and will soon open up a new front. Bob Porto, co-chair of Arkansas Term Limits, said in an interview that organizers will meet to determine next steps, including what the 2016 proposal will look like. A ballot initiative will be created, and signatures will be gathered. Two years from now, voters should have the chance to vote on a simple term limits measure.
Nick Tomboulides, executive director of U.S. Term Limits, which spent $400,000 in ads opposing the measure, said it’s too early to know how big of an investment his group will make in 2016, but it will support the effort.

Unless there’s a problem with the ballot title – or unless a judge decides there’s a problem – that effort will pass, and Arkansas probably will return to having some of the strictest term limits laws in the nation. In the end, it probably will work out.

Amendment 3’s sponsors say the amendment included the term limits provision as part of a compromise. It was needed to gain enough legislative support to get the ethics provisions on the ballot. Many legislators believe that six years in the House just isn’t long enough.

I’m not one who says all elected officials are crooks. At the State Capitol, most legislators seem to act mostly ethically most of the time, which is about like most of us.

But a bit of a fast one was pulled this time, and it shouldn’t have happened. Legislators should not have folded all of these provisions into one ballot initiative and should have been clearer about what “establishing” term limits meant. The attorney general should have disapproved the ballot title. The amendment shouldn’t have survived a court challenge. Voters should have been aware of its provisions – unless, of course, they actually were.

And I should have written about it before the election, not afterwards. Sorry about that.