Opinion: We Need to Legislate Better Pay for Elected State Representatives

Let me explain (and, honestly, divulge, as well)

Opinion: We Need to Legislate Better Pay for Elected State-Serving Representatives


For the last several months, I’ve been working closely with my local state representative who was re-elected for what will be her final term. We are together workshopping policy changes and legislation language needed to protect the youth that, for whatever reason, end up in foster-care at the behest of taxpayer-funded departments that often fail to safeguard their rights and needs.

It’s a tough issue, but one that is close to my heart.

While I met with the representative, who represents 10 towns and like all the representatives in the state of Maine, over 9000 people, it was at her home recently.  After chatting about family and the scope of her latest work for the area, we got to the predetermined reason for my visit - to discuss my personal experience with aging-out of the foster-care system, and reforms I want to see achieved.  Enter the brainstorming, dialogue, agreement, and an outpouring of the several pages worth of memorized statistics I’ve been carrying around for years. Eventually we agree to work more closely together on a bill. But that’s a story for another time, as it’s still developing.

What I want to write about now is what I learned; something that somewhere in my mind I had already learned, but had forgotten.  Something like a dozen single sparks went off in my brain as she answered my questions about her compensation - only $15,000 for the first year and $10,000 for the second year in office (EDIT: over a year after writing this, legislation has passed to increase the pay for House Representatives to almost or just over $20,000 per year - still, it is not enough to make the responsibility accessible to most average-earning people when you consider that some committees meet 5 days a week for 5 months for 6 or 7 hours a day). During her previous terms, she was on one of the most active and important committees the state has, the laws from which govern the Department of Health and Human Services. They meet during the 6 ½ month legislative session for 5 days a week at the state capitol,  oftentimes over 10 hours a day. Some committees meet less, and some more, and your choice or successful nomination to committee does not affect your pay. You get the same whether you meet 5 hours a day 1 day a week or 5 days a week for 10 hours a day. Those working 5x as hard are paid the same amount as those working 1 day a week because pay is based on the roughly 9000 individuals that each district is demarcated to include under the representation of 1 elected house representative.

She had time for me for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I made phone calls every year for a few years to complain and unburden my fears about the common experiences of a disproportionate many former foster youth in the hopes that they do not become the common experiences of today’s current foster youth Particularly after going to Washington D.C as a Congressional Delegate for a foster-youth-focused nonprofit and hearing personal stories from so many (I was lucky to be adopted, but voluntarily re-entered fostercare due to abuses that went un-answered for).  The second reason is, she’s meeting with other people in the community, from business owners to service-providers at publicly-funded clinics, shelters, and constituents like me who persist to be heard. The second reason is that, I live in a very rural county.  In the “city” where I currently live, there are exactly two stop lights and just over 3,000 people. That makes her perhaps more accessible than representatives of more populated and certain more urban districts, but I believe I would have found resonance for my ideas regardless of where I was born and raised. And yet it is considered one of the larger cities in the county across the district. I might have even made further headway with her much earlier, had I been, because of the higher population and chance of meeting peers that care about the same issue to a similar degree, greater mobility due to public transportation [not something that exists in my rural community], and proximity to money or public influence, in the person of others with influence and experience, perhaps heading up organizations serving this vulnerable population.

Though it has been years since my experiences “in care” technically ended, they continued to affect my life throughout my twenties, including my ability to complete college in a reasonable timeframe (having to re-enter the workforce and sign leases after each completed year). States having unique laws and programs and legislation to govern Federal funding provided by the Social Security Act of 1989 means that in some places, former foster youth get a smoother ride, not devoid of challenge, but with many more systems of support, while in others young people succumb to their 25% chance of becoming homeless upon aging out of the system at 18 or 21.

Now, moving onto some reflections on the experience (so far):

What used to be praised as evidence indicating the work of a public official to be a labor of love, more recently in social discourse and ‘the culture’ (air quotes essential) has come to represent the alarmingly low value we place on something that can demand a significant investment of attention, effort and time. Never mind the burden of responsibility of formulating and deciding on which laws become the law of the land, applied and referenced again in policy decisions affecting all public institutions and anything resembling the public commons.  What amounts for many hard-working representatives as a pittance of compensation (more like a consolation prize and a living barely scraping above the poverty-line in terms of salary), also has come to represent a certain above-average degree of privilege one taking up aims for election has to possess, either in access to independent wealth or access to public influence.

Whatever way one pursues the office, whether without campaigning for money (there is the option of the clean elections fund) or through campaigning for money,  he/she/they are looking at relatively low compensation for the sacrifices to be made, depending on how often the committees you are on are meeting. It is materially and symbolically indicative of the public’s valuation of the role as one that is less-than-nuanced.  It is outdated, and does not take into account now the fast-moving pace of our technological advancements, which mean - when taken together - that a LACK of action on a given area or legislative reform can have immediate, and at times dire, consequences for constituent’s real lives.

For context, there is also a deeply entrenched reality of  campaign funds being allowed for qualifying travel expenses and no personal expenses of any kind, which - by itself - is a perfectly reasonable limitation. People expect their donations to go to the work itself, not really thinking too much about the fact that the office itself is expected to be less than part-time, but oftentimes the most willing representatives take up the committee work that demands more than part-time investment.

But where does that leave those who would like to serve in public office and have neither hit the age of retirement or an independent source of wealth that pays their bills?  And where does wherever we leave them, leave our representative body and form of government as a whole?

 How many GenX-ers do you know that are ready to live on their retirement?  And, of those few one could or does, how incentivized are they to do such qualitatively meaningful work at the expense of much of their privacy and - relative - anonymity? Compared to continuing on the habituated path of work culture that America so proudly capitalizes? When we pay pennies on the hour for a job that ought to require full-time, year-round focus given it’s scope and impact, what are we saying? “Your time is worth less in this representative government capacity than it was working for a private corporation’s bottom-line”?  Even those who come from the historically ‘noble’ professions in law, higher-education, and medicine, are looking at a situation where the system at its foundation is built to welcome only those gearing up for their latter-day contributions back to society or who have been part of a minority of people amassing wealth faster than the rate of the worker-CEO wage gap increase. 

Running for office is not something a typical full-time laborer can afford to do. As if working on behalf of the public good is a kind of luxury!

And here we are, every 2 and 4 years, participating as if it is actually vital.  Many of us deriding the state race’s non-voter as if her opinion that her opinion does not count for squat in the system is somehow an imagined delusion.

Given the limitations on who and who cannot run for office, would you say that - at the state level, anyway - that it is? 


Where is it written that only exceptionally wealthy and aged humans are eligible to form and contribute substantive changes to legislative conversation and the policy-making of state government?

How it all works boils down to this: If you contributed to the system of business-as-usual as an individual competing in the free market, you can maybe get some say in the systems that affect every aspect of everyday life for everyone in a state’s body politic actually.  But, not before then.  Not unless you figure out a way to retire at 30.  And, really, is there more than a slim chance that a 30’s millionaire is really going to be interested in public policy?  They are more likely to become serial entrepreneurs.

One additional reason to legislate higher pay for these elected representatives of public office: If taxpayer money funds only a small portion of the living expenses of a person performing their elected duties to the best of their ability (who serves on a committee that is essential for everyday life for many millions of people, 4 or 5 days a week for 6 months of the year), then those influence-minded actors with less-stringent moral codes possess in any dialogue a kind of bargaining chip; they can meet the unmet needs (or better yet, unmet desires) of a person either on fixed limited income or with enough money to be already-removed in some respect from the everyday concerns of the shrinking middle class and struggling financially-insecure. 

People really wonder why it is that law-makers, generally, aren’t always representing the needs of those both younger in years and slimmer in wallet.

Making changes to the compensation for representative election is a solid move to strengthening the foundation of our democracy.

It is a step in the direction of not only transparency, but truly representative government.