Oops, Amodei spokesman got facts wrong in disputing Marshall TV ad

By Anjeanette Damon

Wednesday, July 27, 2011 | 5:07 p.m.

If you’re going to go after your opponent on the facts, it’s usually a good thing to make sure you have your own straight.

In a written statement, former state Sen. Mark Amodei’s spokesman disputed his Democratic opponent’s television ad claim that Amodei had voted for his own pay increase.

“Mark Amodei never voted to give himself a pay raise,” Amodei spokesman Peter DeMarco wrote. “The bill she refers to explicitly stipulated that it did not go into effect until 2011, after Amodei left office due to term limits.”

Not true.

Assembly Bill 462, passed by the Legislature in 2005, gave an immediate pay raise to the state’s constitutional officers. The bill also tied future salary increases for those officers to pay increases for state workers starting in 2011.

But lawmaker salary increases were immediately tied to state worker pay increases.

That means that in 2005, Amodei was making $130 a day for the first 60 days of session. In 2007, he began making $137.90 a day for the first 60 days, according to Lorne Malkiewich, the non-partisan director of the Legislative Counsel Bureau.

The pay increase isn’t exactly huge—it’s just $474. But the fact remains that Amodei did benefit from a salary increase for which he voted.

In his statement, DeMarco did correctly point out that Marshall stopped taking a voluntary 4.6 percent salary cut at the beginning of this year. Instead, Marshall refused to accept the 6 percent salary increase she and other constitutional officers were entitled to, putting her roughly on par with what state workers are experiencing.