State Legislators Need Higher Pay and More Staff

Understaffed and underpaid state legislatures are ripe for corruption.

Photo credit: Adam Meek

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Last week, Arizona State Sen. Eva Burch, who represented the state’s 9th Legislative District, resigned, effective this Friday. Her reason: “Politicians in the Arizona Legislature are making poverty wages.”

“While I certainly understand that we don’t want to be paying our politicians a bunch of money, the problem with that is that it really does lend itself to attracting people who are independently wealthy or otherwise well-kept and maybe are not the best representatives of working-class Arizonans,” Burch said. “I’m not willing to make sacrifices, like to stop investing in my children’s college funds, for example, or to stop saving for retirement.”

Arizona legislators, who technically work part-time, make just $24,000 per year. And this is not only an issue in Arizona.

In fact, 88 percent of all state legislators make less than their respective state’s median income.

The low wages made by both state legislators and their staffs should be a genuine scandal, and undermines our system of federalism and representative democracy. If you want better state legislatures — and to reduce the influence of corporations and corporate donors over your state’s government — an important step is raising state legislator pay and legislative staff pay and numbers.

According to a 2022 survey by the State Innovation Exchange, the average annual salary for state legislators was just $34,074. The National Conference of State Legislators pegged the number last year at $44,320. These numbers are dragged down significantly by the “part-time” and “hybrid” legislators, who make up the bulk of those working at the state level, and who make an average of $11,553 and $29,978, respectively.

Now, the idea that any legislature is truly part-time is ludicrous. Even when they’re not in the capital casting votes, legislators are working, meeting with constituents and advocates, going to events, dealing with incoming requests, and generally doing the work of keeping local representative democracy afloat — as well as fundraising, collecting signatures, door-knocking, and otherwise generally preparing for elections.

So as Sen. Burch said, the low pay means that state legislatures are going to be dominated by either the independently wealthy, or people whose careers allow for that kind of schedule: Hence the many lawyers and realtors running around state capitols. This, of course, makes state legislators more responsive to certain industries and problems and less likely to work on others, particularly those related to classes and industries that are not represented and aren’t politically organized.

Lack of time and resources is then compounded by the skeleton staffs state legislators have to work with. Again, according to that State Innovation Exchange survey, nationwide there’s an average of just 4.4 staffers per state legislator.

But even that number overstates the situation, because it includes permanent staff members who work for the legislature itself, not an individual member, which in many places is referred to as “central staff.” Those are folks who work either as bill drafters or subject matter experts or administrators for certain committees, and have no political affiliation.

In my experience, central staff are an impediment to making substantive changes at the state level as often as they’re useful. They’re very status quo, hesitant to tackle big new legislative ideas, and generally skeptical of anything that hasn’t been done in a bunch of other places already. (This is obviously a generalization; I’ve also met many great central staffers.)

Most of the state legislators I’ve worked with have one or two staffers, tops, and many have zero, or they share a single scheduler or research assistant with several of their colleagues. And the data bear out my sense of it: According to a 2010 survey by the National Conference of State Legislatures, all but six states provide two of fewer staffers to individual legislators; in six states, one staff person covers three or more lawmakers.

These folks are not paid particularly well, either. Many states provide legislative offices with no financial support to hire staff at all, so they pay for staff out of campaign funds or other fundraising. I’ve had many state legislators complain about losing good people to other jobs simply because they couldn’t pay more than the equivalent of an entry-level salary. I’ve also experienced a state representative break out laughing when I asked if I should go through his staff to schedule a follow up meeting, because he doesn’t have any.

Why is this bad? Well, if staffers aren’t doing the work of drafting and vetting legislation, it’s still getting done, but by outside forces, and those outside forces with the most resources — corporate America — are going to have the most reach. Combine that with state legislators who themselves are worn thin by having to hold down a job in addition to their elected position, and you have a recipe for outside influencers doing a hefty portion of the work required to write and evaluate what ultimately becomes law.

I know I’m making this sound corrupt — and there’s certainly some of that! — but most of it is just a simple equation regarding time and money. State legislators consider thousands of bills a year, during sessions that last, at most, six months; they themselves author many bills across a range of subjects in a given year. There’s no way for a human to handle that amount of work without help — and especially not if they have to hold down a second job because their statehouse position is considered part-time and only pays them a few thousand dollars a year.

The practical upshot, then, is that state legislators have to rely on others to do considerable substantive work — both directly drafting legislation and advising them on what their colleagues’ bills mean and would do — and if those others aren’t in-house staff, they’re going to be outsiders: Yes, some of those outsiders are advocates (like myself!) and community members, but they’re also trade associations, corporate lobbyists, and the like, as those are the folks with the resources to spread their wares the widest.

So a very simple way to have better state legislatures and ultimately better laws is to pay state legislators enough to comfortably live on and give them the staff resources to operate more independently. That would attract more and better people to public office and public service, make the legislative process better, and generally improve a state legislative process that is too often slapdash, confusing, and overly responsive to the desires of corporate America.

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UPDATE: Two years ago, I wrote about a sales tax scam that benefits rental car corporations and costs taxpayers billions of dollars every year. Updated numbers show that scam now costs taxpayers $6.3 billion annually across the U.S. — up from $3.5 billion when I first covered it — including hundreds of millions of dollars in states such as Ohio, Texas, New York, and Florida.

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SIMPLY STATED: Here are links to a few stories that caught my eye this week.

• New York Gov. Kathy Hochul proposed expanding the state’s film and TV production tax credit (again!) up to $800 million per year.

• Also in New York, Attorney General Tisch James successfully prosecuted a ski resort for illegally purchasing and then shutting down its main competitor.

• A new report found that the power demand for new data centers could come at a “staggering” cost for utility ratepayers.

• Missouri legislators advanced a bill to allow utilities to charge ratepayers for current power plant construction that has been (correctly) derided as “corporate welfare to monopoly utilities.”

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— Pat Garofalo