Signs point to ‘yes’. On the first day of budget mark-up by the Joint Finance Committee, co-chairs Sen. Harris McDowell and Rep. Dennis P. Williams unveiled a proposed 2% pay hike for state employees. Trouble is that they apparently did not give anyone a ‘heads-up’ on the move. By ‘anyone’, I mean the Markell Administration and the legislators’ respective caucuses. Nor did they seek or receive support from either their own caucuses or the Markell Administration. What makes me think so? These excerpts from today’s News-Journal story(password protected):
Immediately after McDowell announced the plan, Office of Management and Budget Director Ann Visalli spoke up. “This is not the administration’s proposal. The administration is hearing about this for the first time,” she told the committee. “I don’t think you can afford it.”
“I fully support pay raises for state employees, but I think it’s a lot being thrown at us on day one of markup in the first hour,” said Rep. John L. Mitchell Jr., D-Elsmere. “I hope you will give the rest of the committee a little more time to absorb this.”
After realizing that ‘fart in church’ analogies were running rampant, the co-chairs met in private with the Controller General, and then tabled the proposal.
The issue here isn’t whether state employees deserve a raise, which they do. The issue here isn’t really whether or not the Administration supports such a raise. The issue, at least to me, is that two elected legislators, each with strong political motives to do this, sprung this on everyone, including their own caucuses. Said caucuses are led by the President Pro Tempore and the Speaker of the House respectively. They appoint both the chairs and the members of the JFC, and they reasonably expect that proposals like this will be vetted with their members before being thrown out there. I’m going out on a limb here, but they cannot be at all pleased with this. If such an initiative were to have been pursued, they assuredly would have wanted this to come from their respective caucuses. And if they agree with the administration that this increase is not sustainable, a completely defensible position given the current tenuous fiscal conditions, then they look like they helped to thwart a pay increase for state workers. As does, for that matter, the Governor.
Perhaps Dennis Williams thinks that this will help him in his mayoral campaign. I’m not so sure it will, at least when it comes to endorsements and financial support from his own caucus.
Perhaps Harris McDowell thinks that this will help to change the subject from his mismanagement of the SEU. I think it should do the exact opposite. Just listen to McDowell try to justify the numbers behind the pay increase:
“We do not intend to use one-time money,” McDowell said. “There’s already non-one-time money in one-time places.”
Uh, OK. But where exactly is the non-one-time money coming from to pay for this? Coming from someone whose financial skills proved sorely lacking with the SEU, that’s a question he needs to answer.
The real question that McDowell and Williams need to answer, IMHO, is whether this is a serious proposal or just a chance to burnish their political prospects. And, more than anyone, the people who deserve that answer are the state employees who may be in a position of being exploited for political purposes. And if they are being exploited for political purposes, they now know who is doing the exploiting.