Friday, February 06, 2009

Legislative salaries 2009

Here's a cross-post that certainly generated some discussions in Hartford...

The CT Post's Ken Dixon FOI'ed the Legislature and got the salaries of all Crusher's never-to-be colleagues.

See the list here.

If you want to play around with it in Excel, but you are not sure how to manipulate the data - try this:

data (pull down menu) / text to columns / delimited / next / space / finish

I realize that's a pretty weak Excel tutorial. And you'll still need to play around with the cell formatting. But if you look for those words, it oughta be able to help you manipulate the data more easily... so you can easily see how much the top salaries are.

And FWIW, I'd rather not see most of these salaries. But I think it is worthwhile to be able to see the House Dems paying a communications guy $165,000 / year... and the Senate Rs paying a former Senator $103,000 / year. Just doesn't seem right.

Tim White

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

The Governor only makes $150,000 a year. Executive agency heads make less while some of these legislative hacks make more.

Connecticut, you get what you vote for.

Anonymous said...

Who of thesee are politicos who lost their elections and were put on the dole?

This is a good place to start saving money. Even Rell found this to be a good place for her son.

How many are family?

Anonymous said...

I don't know. But I wouldn't necessarily conclude that an insider is holding an Amann-esque "no-show" job. Many may very well hold no-show jobs. I don't know.

To me the question is which are real jobs. For instance, it's entirely possible that a friend of a legislator is a CPA and took a job with their budget team. I'd be fine with that, as long as it's a real job.

I believe the Cheshire rule is that you must be out of office for two years before you take a job with the town. The same rule should probably apply to Hartford. But then the rule could extend to family, etc. You need to draw the line somewhere in order to make sure positions get filled.

Perhaps many of the legislative staff positions should become part of the civil service... in which one needs to take a test to ensure s/he is qualified.

Anonymous said...

"Perhaps many of the legislative staff positions should become part of the civil service."

I don't think so. These are all jobs to support elected people and in effect are supporting a politician. It's not like these are real jobs.

What has to be done, is that these jobs should have job descriptions and proof that they are necessary and it should be stated how many real hour hours a week are required and how many actual days of the year are required. I think we are paying for no shows and paying full-time for part-time work.

Donovan needs 12 people? Ridiculous.

Anonymous said...

Agreed. I'm sure the legislature is chock full of no-show and partial-show jobs. As Amann said, the real issue is getting healthcare coverage.

I'm confident that whether or not there are any duties, and whether or not those duties are fulfilled is largely irrelevant to the "need" for the jobs.