The Legislature voted yesterday to throw more money at itself:
The Legislature is “by far the least costliest” of the three branches, [House Speaker Brian] Gosch said. When its staff are overworked, “they make errors.” Approving extra funding, he said, well make the Legislature “a more effective legislative body.”
[Senate Majority Leader Russell] Olson praised hiring some partisan legislative staff.
“We have to rely on the nonpartisan nature of the LRC to keep secrets… that puts them in an unfair position at many times,” Olson said [David Montgomery, "Legislature Approves $500K Hike to Own Budget," Political Smokeout, 2013.03.08].
So the Legislature needs to increase its budget to reduce errors and keep more secrets.
O.K. Let's assume that the overwork under which our legislators suffer comes in part from the 7.4% budget cut the Legislature took in Governor Dennis Daugaard's FY2012 "new norm" austerity budget. Let's apply similar fiscal logic to K-12 education.
- The Legislature has 105 primary workers, our elected representatives and senators.
- They work for 2 months each year.
- They are giving themselves $493,000 above what a 2.1% increase for inflation would put in their budget.
- Gosch and Olson are saying they need about $2350 more per legislator per month to get their jobs done.
- Our K-12 public schools have just over 9,000 teachers.
- We work for 9 months each year.
- If Gosch and Olson felt teachers needed a budget increase proportionate to what they are giving themselves to do their jobs better, they'd increase state aid to K-12 education by ($2350 times 9 months times 9000 teachers) $190 million.
- In general education, special education, and technology funds, Gosch and Olson are giving K-12 education $15.8 million above a 2.1% increase for inflation.
- In other words, teachers only need $193 more per teacher per month to deal with whatever factors are making their jobs harder... a twelfth of what Gosch and Olson are giving themselves.
- We could go ape and look at the total allocations for the Legislature and K-12 education per worker per month. If it took as much money to help 9000 teachers do their work each month as it takes to help 105 legislators do their work for 2 months, South Dakota would spend $3.24 billion on K-12 education, not the $390 million appropriated in the FY2014 budget.
Here's another budget perspective: if you look at the last six state budgets, you see that both the Legislature's operating budget and the state aid to K-12 education have finally returned to FY2009 levels. K-12 aid will be 0.8% higher than it was in FY2009; Gosch and Olson will operate with 6.7% more than they had in FY2009.
I guess it's a good thing we teachers can operate much more efficiently than our legislators.
Reference: South Dakota State Budgets as Passed by Legislature:
The legislators bring some of this upon themselves. If they quit entering so may UNNECESSARY bills, they would not have to work so hard during the session and maybe could finish the budget in a more timely manner instead of rushing everything through at the last minute.
Unlike Congress, our legislators actually do get work done and we have to be grateful for their efforts. In these lean economic times, they are going to have to be more efficient with their money.
Yes, they could also waste less time by forgetting about inane resolutions to the US Congress and President and perhaps forget about announcing every old legislator or lobbyist who drops by the chambers.
As now set up, one house is as redundant as teats on a boar. Since around 1965 or 1966, the "one man-one vote" requirement has made meant state bicameral legislators waste usually about half of what taxpayers dump into the legislatures.
This total waste of money will not be changed by legislators whose leaders just love those totally redundant "leadership" positions.
Making sense of the legislative system will require a constitutional amendment. It is about 55 years late already.
How does giving the legislatures more money result in them making fewer mistakes? On the other hand, how do we know that $190 million isn't the result of French math?
The partisan staff thing is intriguing.
Maybe you and Pat Powers can share an PLRC*office. All the two of you would need to set up office space together is concrete blocks to construct bunker-like cubicles and really strong passwords on your computers.
*Partisan Legisislative Research Council
I kid because I care : )
Explore non-partisan unicameral. I know. I know. It's impossible to be "completely" non-partisan. But it could streamline the extraneous gamesmanship at less cost the citizens that are paying the freight. I've heard it's been tried elsewhere with some success.
throwing more money at the problem isn't going to fix it. (that's the excuse these people use to not fund education fully)
The Legisislative increase should be tied to the increase in operational aid they provide to school districts.
The increase in the legislative budget is nothing but a further attempt to place more power within the Republican party.
Education deserves a great deal more funding in my opinion, but I also don't think it is crazy that the legislature could benefit from funding as well. The lack of professional staff combined with term limits hurts institutional memory and knowledge, and puts a lot of pressure on legislators that try to muddle through issues that they don't have the slightest clue about. I'll guess that many people have sat through a caucus at one time or another and wished there was someone on hand that had time to more thoroughly study and understand the history of proposals.
Groups like ALEC prey on this weakness. Legislators, lacking their own resources, rely on these sorts of groups. Permanent, professional staff can help with this. It is unfortunate that much of this staff could be repubican, but that is a fact of life. Democrats will get more of it when we make inroads. There should be rules in place to ensure that strictly partisan activities don't happen on the taxpayer dollar, just as those sort of rules govern the activities of federal congressional employees.
Maybe if the legislature had less money they would get more worthwhile things done. Instead of wasting time on things like guns in schools, making abortion harder to get, and going back a few years, a state dessert.
I agree with Brett that our Legislature can make good use of some dedicated staff. More eyes on bills has to result in better bills. More people to handle office tasks has to mean more time for legislators to talk to constituents. And institutional memory matters.
Of course, the money also restores travel budget, which means more trips to ALEC events.
Pat and me as partisan staff? LK, that would be awesome! Bring us out to Pierre from the beginning of December (Governor's budget address) until beginning of March, pay us to blog all day about the policy issues the legislators bring before us. Every blog post has to be about a specific bill (either in the hopper or being drafted). We get to add links to our blog posts on the official bill webpages. What fun!
" Every blog post has to be about a specific bill ("
What? No omnibus blog posts?
One interesting thing I learned lately is that ALEC often offers "scholarships" to legislators to attend their events, so they may not even require travel expenses from taxpayers to take part in ALEC activities.