Small Town News

Base legislative salary on performance

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In Our Opinion

Let's say you have a big, important home repair job. You ask for bids from several contractors, who come to your home, look the situation over and send you quotes for their time and costs to do the work.

You select the contractor who says they can get things done correctly, timely and within budget but then once on the job, they find they can't do the work as quoted. They ask for an extension and they ask to be paid for it even though they knew going in what was involved.

Would you pay them?

It's a simple example but in a sense that's exactly what's happening right now in Olympia with the state Legislature going into special session to address the 2011-2013 biennial budget Having failed to produce a plan in their 105-day regular session, the allotted time, members are now taking an extra 30 days to reconcile the House and Senate budgets produced in April.

The special session is costing taxpayers $16,000 per day, $480,000 total if it goes the full length. In our opinion, legislators shouldn't be paid for this special session. They knew going in the challenges at hand to overcome a $5 billion deficit between revenues and expenses and should have taken measures to ensure the budget was produced in time.

That's what they said they would do and it's what voters expected them paid them, to do.

In all fairness, legislators faced a difficult budgeting task this year. Big cuts were made in last year's session,

and again in a one-day special session m December after new revenue forecasts. There wasn't much left to cut without creating a lot of pain.

Add to that an electorate that drank the public relations Kool-Aid and torpedoed several revenue generating measures at the ballot box last November, but yet still wants affordable education, health care, law enforcement and other services and legislators were in the proverbial "rock and a hard place."

Nope, the public shares responsibility for this predicament as much as legislators.

But legislators knew the economy and the budget would be the big-ticket items. They knew there would be many people clamoring to preserve their budgets while making cuts elsewhere. They knew nobody favored tax or fee increases.

They gave us bids for the work last November and still haven't done it. And now it's costing us $16,000 a day, and that's minimum. With school districts declaring financial emergencies to enact their budgets as required by law who know what the final impacts will be?

Maybe not paying salaries and benefits during a special session is harsh, but there needs to be something to focus lawmakers' energies on pressing matters during regular session, especially when economic circumstances require it. When times are good, it's fine to debate about making coffee the state drink, but when times are bad it's all about getting the budgeting done.

We know it's difficult, and we wouldn't want to trade places. But that's what we hired them to do because they said they could do it.

Now the question may be, should we hire them back?



Copyright 2011 Cheney Free Press, Cheney, Washington. All Rights Reserved. This content, including derivations, may not be stored or distributed in any manner, disseminated, published, broadcast, rewritten or reproduced without express, written consent from SmallTownPapers, Inc.

© 2011 Cheney Free Press Cheney, Washington. All Rights Reserved. This content, including derivations, may not be stored or distributed in any manner, disseminated, published, broadcast, rewritten or reproduced without express, written consent from DAS.

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