The Haines Borough may soon be asking you for more tax support to keep it afloat.
That’s understandable.
Our government leaders in Alaska and Washington, D.C. at one time believed that they owed support to places like Haines, and we received it. That was about 30 years ago, before our national ethos shifted from “women and children first” to “every man for himself.”
In Alaska, oil money buffered us a bit from that virus, but now it’s here, apparently to stay, with a governor who would take our municipal raw fish tax, hobble our schools and shut down our ferry service.
In the coming years we can expect to see what the people of the Haines Borough are made of, and how much they believe in this place as a community rather than just a place to live.
At a recent meeting, Haines Borough assemblywoman Brenda Josephson proposed reducing assembly pay from $125 per meeting to $25.
(Assembly members are paid $125 per regular meeting, and a maximum of $250 per month. Josephson left the $25 in because she thought that eliminating pay altogether might be a bookkeeping problem.)
I agree with Josephson, but would eliminate this pay entirely, in part because the assembly soon will be asking residents either to accept cuts to programs or pay more in taxes, or both. To show taxpayers that we, in government, are willing to absorb some of the cut, this would be a small but meaningful gesture.
But outside of our current financial situation, there are very good reasons to eliminate assembly pay, including:
- Assembly pay is too low to compensate a conscientious assembly member. Member Sean Maidy suggested at a recent meeting that $125 was acceptable, based on the number of hours in a meeting. But anyone who has ever served on any active board knows that meeting hours are just a fraction of the hours a person works. Duties between regular meetings include investigating issues, researching and developing new ideas, meeting with constituents, and attending other, obligatory meetings. Doing a good job requires at least 10 hours a week outside regular meetings, reading, speaking and meeting. Sometimes, in the midwinter meeting season, the hours are closer to 40. In actual time worked, for an assembly member wanting to do more than rubber-stamp ideas from city hall, the pay is a negligible amount.
- Assembly pay is an incentive to be lazy. On a recent trip back to Philadelphia I was working on borough issues and a family member asked me if I got paid for my work. I said, “A small amount.” Which elicited a familiar response: “Well, if you’re getting paid, and you asked for the job, do your work.” But let’s think about that for a minute. What worker has every volunteered to work overtime? In real terms, if assembly pay is at all about compensation, assembly pay is an incentive to do a poor job. Because putting in the hours to a good job doesn’t pay any more than putting in no hours outside of meetings and doing a bad one. Hard-working assembly members are paid the same as lazy ones. Which is contrary to the idea of why we pay people at all.
- Assembly pay is too high to attach honor to the work. To do a good job, an assembly member must regularly confront powerful or influential people or groups seeking some favor from the government. This often comes down to saying “no,” to honorable people with honorable intent. That’s difficult to do, unless you can show you’ve also personally said “no” to feeding at the public trough. Honor is the coin of the realm in politics. Military heroes who’ve risked their lives for their country go right to the top in politics. Success in government politics – the art of making decisions on behalf of others – is very much about what you’re willing to sacrifice for your town, or your state or your country. Sacrificing monetary compensation automatically adds honor to serving on the assembly, providing political wampum much more valuable than $250 per month.
Those points notwithstanding, I support allowing compensation to cover for actual personal expenses of assembly members to attend meetings, costs like gasoline for members who are highway residents, babysitters for members who are young parents, etc. It has been legitimately argued that such costs might prevent some people from serving on the assembly. Fine. If assembly members accrue actual, cash expenses for attending regular meetings, let’s allow them to claim those, with receipts, and make public those amounts. That would keep takers honest.
But let’s get away from assembly pay as compensation. As an idea, it’s a failure.