Big raises coming for state bosses

Pay for top state executives shouldn't depend on whether powerful legislators like them personally or not, or even whether they liked the job the department heads were doing or not, some state leaders said.

Top executives serve at the pleasure of the governor, and the governor alone should be deciding the pay (within a broad salary range) and perks of his top officials, the argument went.

"There's still politics," said Senate Majority Leader Curt Bramble, R-Provo, the sponsor of last session's legislation on executive compensation. "Ideally, it would take us out of it. Anybody who believes we will be completely out of it hasn't been around very long."

Bramble said his bill was intended to give the governor more flexibility to set executive salaries as well as to stop lawmakers from being lobbied for more money for department heads.

"We didn't appropriate more money to the executive branch. We just gave more discretion for the governor to set salaries for his top executives," Bramble said. "Now ... we don't have a bull's-eye with departments lobbying to say our guy deserves more money."

A look at Huntsman's top executives and their new pay levels also shows that only a handful of the Cabinet members are women.

Roskelley said Huntsman seeks to appoint top people for each post — and in some cases, like Workforce Services boss Kristen Cox and Human Services director Lisa-Michele Church (both of whom will soon be earning $123,510 a year), those are women.

Other times, he hires men.

"The governor just brought Dianne Nielson over as his personal energy adviser (the former head of the Department of Environmental Quality), and she was replaced there by Rick Sprott, who ran a division at DEQ. "

Jeff Herring, state human resources director, said the governor adjusted the salaries of state executives in March. Those who have been working the past year without a pay hike were given a cost of living increase. Some also received another pay boost.

The governor's budget director, John Nixon, was making just under $105,800 when the bill took effect in March. When the new budget years begins July 1, he'll end up with the biggest pay increase, a 20 percent boost to $126,900.

Nixon is an exception, Herring said, because he took close to a $30,000 pay cut when he left the Division of Workforce Services last year as a deputy director. It's to "try to get him back not to where he was but to say we appreciate the work," Herring said.

"When the governor asks you to serve, you serve. I was excited," Nixon said. "But I think it kind of highlighted the problem with the overall compensation system in the state because you had a lot of the deputy directors making more than the directors in the state."