A $10 pay raise urged for Utah's legislators

However, the commission also recommends that any legislator who needs to spend a night in Salt Lake in a hotel during the general session can get re-reimbursement — but only if they actually stay in a hotel.

Sen. Greg Bell, R-Fruit Heights, addressed the commission asking that along with other salary/benefit reforms, the commission also encourage legislators to adopt Bell's bill that would require all gifts of $10 or greater in value to legislators be listed by registered lobbyists. The current reporting level is $50 a day. Bell's bill died in a Senate committee in the 2005 Legislature, but he said Senate leaders "have shown some interest" in supporting it this coming session.

"A modest increase in pay, doing away with the disparity in actual-use hotel re-reimbursement and greater gift disclosure" should help the Legislature and citizens both, said Bell.

The Legislature can accept the commission's recommendations, reject them in total, or can accept a pay hike smaller than the recommendation. It cannot increase the pay recommendations. If lawmakers don't act at all, the commission's pay hike recommendations automatically take effect starting in January 2007. Thus, all of the 75-member House and half of the 29-member Senate would face voters in November 2006 before the pay hikes take effect.

While the $10-a-day pay hike may not seem like much, commission member Robert Weatherbee said, but when escalating health care and retirement benefits are figured in, legislators are getting generous annual benefit increases few Utahns know about.

"Health insurance (premiums) are growing at 8 to 10 percent a year," said Weatherbee, who described himself as self-employed and having to struggle with heath care costs each year. Almost all legislators sign up for the state's generous health care program.

"It's like a $12,000 pay hike in health and retirement for them," said Weatherbee.

While most legislators only spend four to eight years in office, the number of long-term legislators is growing. In the 2004 elections, more than 90 percent of House and Senate members who sought re-election won.

Weatherbee and other commission members worried that while actual pay for Utah legislators is about average among Mountain West states, benefits here are good. And those good benefits — especially heath insurance for life for a retired lawmaker and his or her spouse — could be enticing more and more legislators to serve longer and longer.

"And from my point of view, that may not be a good thing," said commission chairman Milton Thackeray.

"Well, we used to have term limits" for legislators, noted commission member Alarik Myrin, a former state senator. "But (legislators) repealed them."

Finally, commission members said in recent years legislators have ignored some or all of the commission's recommendations. The commission asks that lawmakers consider giving the LCC complete authority over all aspects of legislative compensation — salary, benefits and per diem.

Thackeray said because the commission can only deal with pay, "We are giving the public the impression that we are setting all of (lawmakers') salaries and benefits; it's felonious."

If the commission is not given more legal authority over other areas of legislators' compensation, perhaps the commission should just be repealed in law and the Legislature go back to setting its own pay as it did a number of years ago, Thackeray said.

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