Complaints over state lawmaker pay raise are petty

Washington state legislators find themselves the happy recipients of an 11.2 percent pay bump, courtesy of the The Washington Citizens’ Commission on Salaries for Elected Officials.

They first proposed the increase in January, finalizing it Wednesday. The part-time lawmakers will be slowly bumped to $46,839 over a two year period.

“We thought there was some catching up to do,” board member Melissa Albert said to KIRO TV. “We don’t want to have a Legislature made up of only people who are independently wealthy.”

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Of course not everyone is happy. You have voters wondering if it’s appropriate to give a raise; Given they’re not in special session over their inability to come to an agreement on the state operating budget, they still don’t have an agreed-upon plan to fund education, and the transportation plan still lingers.

I wonder how many of the angry voters are law-skilled, low-wage workers who bullied their way into a higher wage without having to demonstrate their financial value to the company.

You also have teachers upset because the lawmaker pay bump is “larger than raises under consideration in the Legislature for the state workforce.”

So the veteran teacher who has summers off, has remarkable job security, and is making $90,757 in Everett, is upset that the state legislator, who has to be away from his or her family to argue with lawmakers in Olympia will make under both the state and national average salary?

I can understand bad optics, but being upset with a modest salary bump to people who take on the incredible task of helping to run Washington seems petty and mostly fueled by ideology. Politics is messy and coming to a compromise on important topics is incredibly difficult, especially when you have such a large group of folks with competing interests. But at the end of the day, nearly all of these legislators are in the game for the right reasons: What’s best for the state and for their constituents. Sure, they have different ideas on how to get to their shared goal, but let’s not pretend every politician is greedy and soulless and in it for themselves. We live in a democracy where you ultimately have the power to keep these politicians in office or kick them out.

The truth is, $46,839 is not a lot of money for lawmakers, especially when you consider the inequity (that’s a microaggression, folks) in how eastern Washington representatives are treated (it’s pretty hard to make a living during the “day job” when you live in Kennewick or Pullman, but have to be in Olympia legislating. And if you don’t think they’re worth that modest sum, vote them out.