March 01, 2012 08:11 PM UTC

Shaffer, Senate Democrats Moderate Per Diem Pay Raise Fiasco

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• by: Colorado Pols

As the Durango Herald’s Joe Hanel reports:

The Senate gave final approval to a bill that funds an increase in per diem pay for rural lawmakers Wednesday morning on a 21-13 vote…

Three Republicans and 10 Democrats voted no on HB 1301, including Senate President Brandon Shaffer, D-Longmont, who had been a co-sponsor.

“This does not impact my pay, and I support additional help for our rural lawmakers, but I’m voting ‘no’ because, right now, with our severe budget issues, I feel it’s just not the right time,” Shaffer said in a prepared statement.

He is running for Congress in the Eastern Plains district. One of the Republican ‘no’ votes came from Sen. Kevin Lundberg, R-Berthoud, who is running for Congress in the northern Front Range district.

We have been clear from the beginning on two important facts about this story: first, our agreement that legislators are underpaid, and second, that the disastrous handling of this bill in the GOP-controlled House made the the issue of raising legislative per diem toxic. The absolute worst way to have handled this in-effect request of taxpayers for higher compensation was to try to ram it through with no debate. This confirms a lesson we have tried to inculcate in our readers for years: you will never, ever make a negative story go away by hiding it.

Fortunately for Democrats, whether by better insight or simply watching the situation explode in House Speaker Frank McNulty’s lap, the Democratic Senate had a much more open debate about the need to raise legislative per diem. Senate Majority Leader John Morse, who we’ve been critical of for his brusque handling of questions about this, publicly took ownership of the political unpopularity. With that in mind, it was still very wise for Senate President Brandon Shaffer to remove his name from the bill and vote no–and it’s worth noting Sal Pace’s vote against in the House. In the end, considerably more Republicans voted for House Bill 1301 in both chambers than Democrats, and that may be the best yardstick for electoral utility/risk.

One additional point we feel obligated to make: there is perhaps no one we are more sympathetic to in this story than state employees who did not get a raise, per diem or salary–and haven’t in four years. Not minor-celebrity legislators who may or may not deserve special treatment, but snowplow drivers, nurses, corrections officers, people who care for the disabled, employees at the state mental health facility in Pueblo. State workers have taken the legislature’s budget cuts in the teeth for four years–pay cuts, furloughs, shrinking resources to do their job–and if they complain, some Republicans call them “scum.”

Anyway, we hope they’ve been paying vote-by-vote attention. We suspect they have.