Columnist Jon Ralston: Gang of 63 grossly underpaid

Friday, March 23, 2001 | 5:12 a.m.

Jon Ralston hosts the public affairs program "Face to Face" on Las Vegas ONE and also publishes the Ralston Report. His column for the Sun appears on Sundays and Wednesdays. Ralston can be reached at 870-7997 or by e-mail at ralston@vegas.com

IMAGINE an employer trying to find good help with this job description:

Salary: $3,900 a year.

Job description: Spend four months every other year rubber-stamping the work of others and occasionally getting something accomplished that means anything to anyone.

Benefits: Extended time away from family, supervisors who have no idea what you do but demand satisfaction on things you can't change, and constant abuse from an obnoxious, even offensive pack of scribblers.

You would have to be insane to accept the job. Actually, you'd have to be either rich or virtually unemployable. And, yet, this is what you, the public, offer your state lawmakers. And then you expect them to produce quality work and never screw up.

And yet, as a legislative hearing last week proved, these lawmakers seem reluctant to ask you for a raise because they fear your wrath. "I think the concern we all have is our opponents will use it against us," whined Ways and Means Chairman Morse Arberry, D-Las Vegas, during testimony on a bill that would provide mere cost-of-living increases every year. But fellow Las Vegas Democrat Chris Giunchigliani hit the right note when she rejoined: "We have to stop thinking that we can't act because we might not get elected next time."

This situation is almost a parody. Here you have salaries based on those embedded in a document written in 1864 (the state Constitution), a Fourth Estate that generally won't cut lawmakers a break and support any increase, and a Gang of 63 with so many craven members who care too much about retaining these sub-minimum-wage jobs.

Yes, history does linger. The infamous 300 percent pension increase of 1989 still looms large for some lawmakers. They remember the electoral carnage wrought by the passage of that initiative, the subsequent special session to repeal it and the media obloquy that followed. But that issue was so poorly thought-out, and the damage control so ineptly executed, that the situations are not analogous.

Everyone -- business, media types, gamers and lobbyists -- knows that lawmakers are grotesquely underpaid. Most people who have followed the Legislature realize that most of the shibboleths are myths. The session is not just a long party where lawmakers sit on their duffs all day playing Solitaire on their laptops and then party all night on lobbyists' tabs. Oh, sure that happens. But those are the exceptions, not the rules.

It was no accident that a parade of former lawmakers testified before the committee last week advocating for the pay raises. A double irony was obvious in that most of those ex-legislators are now lobbyists.

First, since they are supplicants in Carson City now for clients, these folks would be only too happy to provide cover for lawmakers whose votes they need. But, second, there's a reason most of them became lobbyists (besides losing an election): The pay is astronomically better, and so is the influence on the process.

So you want a system run by the lobbying corps and have lawmakers who are either too wealthy to care about the salaries, too dumb or venal to care, or too committed to being do-gooders that they sacrifice too much? Fine. Then don't change a thing.

So many answers to pertinent questions are important:

* Does anyone think it's an accident that the prevalent movement in Nevada politics is from state government to local government, and not vice-versa? The list goes on --- Karen Hayes, Matt Callister, Erin Kenny, Dario Herrera.

Think it's happenstance that Assemblywoman Merle Berman thought about getting onto the City Council (she was one of the Michael McDonald vultures) right after she was re-elected last year? Local government pays better, elected officials can have more of an impact and they can live in Las Vegas full-time.

* Does anyone think legislators don't do anything when the session ends? Constituents don't stop pestering them. They have to go to meetings, keep up on issues. It's a year-round job.

* Does anyone think that with low-paid lawmakers, and a system compressed into 120 days of them lending their imprimatur to lobbyist deals, that egregious mistakes won't be made? I don't have the space here to list all of them, but without better-paid people, more staff and longer (and annual) sessions, the quality will continue to suffer.

Sneer at them, if you will. Object to modest salary increases, if you will. But, in the end, you are the ones who will pay the price.