Rising salaries on taxpayer tab
The Georgia Governor’s Office says the governor needs a pay raise. Not this governor, but the next one.
Still, even though this obviously isn’t an attempted money grab by, or for, Gov. Nathan Deal, some of the circumstances detailed in a weekend report by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution should make Georgians skeptical, at best, about the idea.
The governor’s chief of staff said the governor has a hard and demanding job, despite the perks. Unarguably true.
But one of the circumstances that would seem to be driving this proposal is the fact that so many high-ranking state officials have gotten hefty raises over the past year that many of them now make more than the governor. So it’s hardly unreasonable for a Georgia taxpayer to ask whether it’s a matter of the governor being underpaid so much as a roster of unelected officials being overpaid.
Some of the substantial raises already reported would raise little if any public objection, particularly the ones for state law enforcement officers and overworked (and underpaid) child welfare caseworkers.
Others might not be so politically palatable. For instance, former lawmaker Jay Roberts, Deal’s appointee as Department of Transportation planning director, saw his salary go from $155,000 to $186,000. Pay for the executive counsel to the Governor’s Office went from $137,500 to $169,000. Georgia Public Safety Commissioner Mark McDonough, whose pay had been $140,000 a year since 2011, got a $30,000 raise. And while there was considerable (and understandable) outcry about many teachers not getting the full 3 percent raise the state appropriated for salaries last year, top officials of the Teacher Retirement System had no such complaint: The chief investment officer’s salary went from $553,870 to $586,000 — not counting bonuses.
The AJC cites figures from the Council of State Governments in noting that the Georgia governor’s salary of $139,339 is in the “middle range” nationally. Pennsylvania’s is the highest, at $190,000, Maine’s the lowest at $70,000. Georgia’s might or might not be appropriate, given the size of the state and the specific constitutional demands of the job.
The “recruiting and retaining the best” argument for massive and arbitrary raises, while not without merit, goes only so far. Private business uses private money, not taxpayer money, for such incentives.
Incidentally, the proposed budget for fiscal 2018, which begins July 1, calls for a raise for most state workers, including teachers, of 2 percent.
Thanks, but … nah
The Macon Telegraph reports that some folks in Centerville found recruitment fliers distributed around their neighborhoods on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday … from the Ku Klux Klan.
As one distressed resident acknowledged, the Klan fliers are protected by the First Amendment, as they should be. A Klan spokesman told the Telegraph that “we cannot celebrate our history without being called racists” (go figure), and that “we want the white community to know that they are being represented.”
As what? Never mind.
This story was originally published January 17, 2017 at 3:25 PM with the headline "Rising salaries on taxpayer tab."