Cleaning House, Part 1: Low-hanging fruit

By Carter Bundy

Ethics reform is like playoff baseball. It’s complicated, surprising and long. In reviewing the recent recommendations of the Governor’s Task Force on Ethics Reform, there are really three sets of issues: campaign financing, transparency and legislator income.

Each of the three topics deserves its own column, so let’s start with the low-hanging fruit: legislator income.

Give ‘em a break: Time for legislator pay

Here’s the best-kept secret in New Mexico politics: Many of our state legislators work nearly year-round, full-time, at representing their districts. You’ve got one or two months of having to be in Santa Fe literally almost every day. That’s just the tip of the iceberg, though.

Outside of the session, you’ve got at least a few full-time weeks before the session when you prepare your bills and brush up on issues. There are months of meetings with interest groups to discuss why new legislation is essential or needs to be killed. There are hundreds of capital outlay requests to prioritize with your constituents and local governments. Constituents deserve service from their legislators 24/7, and, as any legislator will tell you, they expect it.

There is important interim committee work that is conducted in meetings held all over the state. Particularly for committees that meet three days a month, like the Legislative Finance Committee or Legislative Education Study Committee, you have to dedicate a week once you include travel to Hobbs or Farmington. Some legislators literally meet 15-20 weekdays in a month, depending on their committee assignments.

And that’s just the substantive side. On top of all that, there are campaigns every two years in the House and every four years in the Senate. The campaigns require a year of fundraising, signature-gathering, door-knocking, phone-banking, neighborhood association meetings, parades, filings, sign distribution, filling out questionnaires, attending debates and candidate forums, meeting with print journalists, radio and TV interviews… phew, the list is as long as an American League playoff game!

This is all supposed to be done by someone who needs to support a family? Good luck with that.

The ethics task force is right: Pay our legislators. It’s a drop in the bucket, it will reward those who do the hard work of democracy, and it will deepen the candidate talent pool. We have many excellent legislators in both parties, but the burden they face financially and time-wise is absurd.

How about this for a bonus: Tie legislator pay directly to average New Mexican household income. There’s all the incentive you need to make sure average folks’ concerns are taken care of. And maybe some average folks could even consider getting involved themselves.

Feeding the hand that feeds you

Even with this year’s gift limits, lobbyists currently buy all kinds of gifts for legislators, particularly meals and drinks. If you’re a taxpayer, wouldn’t you rather know that legislators are going to vote on a union bill, or a corporate bill, or tax breaks, or capital outlay, without being literally fed by the people asking for their support that evening?

On the other hand, as several senators asked during this year’s debate in the Legislature, if legislators aren’t getting paid, and they’re foregoing any reasonable chance of working a full-time job, how are they going to afford eating in Santa Fe every day and night for 30 or 60 days?

(Of course, that’s a question that opponents of Santa Fe’s living wage might want to ask on behalf of people who actually live in Santa Fe year-round, but that doesn’t make it any less fair a question for legislators).

Here’s how: Legislator salaries are one part of the equation, but so is a basic committee budget during the session and interim to ensure that our hard-working legislators can eat – without the slightest appearance of impropriety.

Don’t eat and drink, but be merry

Last year, I was in Sacramento helping with one of our member trainings. We hosted a big reception for legislators and members. Great chance for legislators to hear not from me, or even our union’s elected leaders, but from rank-and-file men and women.

What made the event interesting was that while legislators were listening to the people who make the city and state work – solid waste guys, public safety officers, child abuse investigators, DOT workers, librarians and many more – it was the workers who were scarfing down the appetizers and sodas (OK, they weren’t all sodas), not the electeds.

California has a very strict gift law – $25 per year if I recall correctly, inclusive of all meals and drinks. To stay on the good side of the rule, every single legislator simply drank water. Agua. L’eau. That’s it. From the tap, and I don’t mean the fun kind of tap.

You might think it was a downer for legislators, but I remember more than a few of them commenting that they were proud to be part of the new system. They were there to meet with workers, citizens, taxpayers, constituents, and that was all. It was representative government at its best.

I don’t think most New Mexico legislators are swayed by food, drink and gifts, but wouldn’t it be nice if the average New Mexican had no doubts at all?

The California legislators didn’t want for food that night. Because they’re salaried, they were able to dine that evening somewhere else, knowing it was their own hard work and the voting taxpayers to whom they owed the pleasure. Sometimes California gets it right.

Bundy is the political and legislative director for AFSCME in New Mexico. The opinions in his column are personal and do not necessarily reflect any official AFSCME position. You can learn more about him by clicking here. Contact him at carterbundy@yahoo.com.