Part of the reason legislators swiftly moved legislation to reject pay increases for Gov. Mike Dunleavy and his cabinet was because the Alaska State Officers Compensation Commission didn’t recommend raises for them. In fact, the last time the panel recommended changes to legislator compensation, it recommended what was effectively a pay cut.
Legislators complained the commission was “rotten with politics” when they passed a measure rejecting raises for the governor and his cabinet and argued the recommendations needed to be all-inclusive, meaning it needed to include legislator compensation.
The governor apparently got the message and by this Tuesday, every commissioner had either resigned or been removed from the panel. By Wednesday afternoon, a new slate of commissioners was appointed and, according to reporting by the Anchorage Daily News, in a 15-minute meeting approved a recommendation increasing legislators’ salaries from $50,400 to $84,000, a 67% increase.
It leaves legislator per diem payments untouched. The commission had previously suggested a significant cut to per diem payments as part of what would have been an overall cut to legislator compensation in last year’s proposal, which legislators swiftly rejected.
The new recommendation will automatically go into effect unless the Legislature passes legislation opposing it. The governor and his cabinet will also get their pay raises because the new recommendation is technically an amendment to the earlier one, therefore sidestepping the disapproving legislation.
Murky process
The commission reportedly voted to waive their public notice requirements to take up the motion despite concerns from some members that they weren’t adequately including the public in the process. It’s also not entirely clear just how they so quickly reached the $84,000 figure.
Here’s what Commissioner Duff Mitchell, the member who made the motion for $84,000, told the Anchorage Daily News:
“I think I picked it up, there was some discussion, or read something where, I don’t know who it was, I don’t know where I picked it up, but they were talking about some kind of benchmark to the commissioners,” said Mitchell in an interview. He later added that he may have spoken about the idea when he was interviewed by a member of the governor’s office for the commission position. “I don’t know how that came up or whatever. So I may have shared it.”
No one could really explain, either, why it was expedited.
Here’s the ADN’s reporting on that question:
Asked why he chose to hold a vote Wednesday rather than waiting to make recommendations at a later date, Handeland, the commission chair, took a long pause.
“I don’t know if there was urgency in that,” he said.
Reading between the lines
That’s likely to do with the pending legislation to reject the governor’s pay raise. Under the law, the commission’s recommendations go into effect unless a bill disapproving them becomes law. The Legislature advanced it with a veto-proof majority, giving themselves just enough time to override a potential veto. By forwarding the pay raises for legislators as an amendment to the previous recommendations for the governor and his cabinet along with the requested raises for legislators, it’s likely a way for the governor and his cabinet to secure their raises without a dust up over a potential veto.
In the big picture, legislators and those in state government have argued that the years of flat salaries for officials have made it increasingly difficult to recruit executives and attract legislative candidates from all walks of life. In rejecting last year’s pay cuts, legislators worried that it would leave it so only the independently wealthy could serve in the Alaska Legislature.
While much of the fight has been over the internal politics of pay raises and who gets them, the bipartisan House Minority had staked out opposition to the executive pay raises for a different reason: Stagnant school funding. In an early statement, the organization argued that executive pay raises should wait until action is taken on school funding.
Stay tuned.
Matt Acuña Buxton is a long-time political reporter who has written for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and The Midnight Sun political blog. He also authors the daily politics newsletter, The Alaska Memo, and can frequently be found live-tweeting public meetings on Twitter.
