Kansas legislators get automatic 8.5 percent raise in their allowance

Kansas lawmakers quietly and automatically got an 8.5 percent raise in their allowance last month.

The raise is because of an escalator clause in state law that has increased lawmakers’ daily “subsistence payments” by more than 28 percent through the past seven years of fiscal woes, employee pay freezes and cuts in other government departments.

The payments, also known as per diem, are the set amount lawmakers get to pay their living expenses each day they work in Topeka.

As of Oct. 1, it’s $140 a day, up from $129.

The per diem payments are actually about 45 percent more than legislators earn in salary, and the money is theirs to keep and spend however they want.

For the legislators, those automatic raises in per diem essentially represent an increase in their compensation, without them having to make the politically difficult floor vote to raise their salaries.

The Legislature set it up in 2008 so that the member’s per diem is the same as and rises with the per diem that federal workers get for expenses when they’re traveling on government business.

The allowance payments are in addition to the state lawmakers’ base salary of $88.66 a day when they attend session and committee meetings.

Since lawmakers tied their per diem rate to the federal rate, their payments have increased by 28.4 percent, from $109 a day in 2008 to $140, according to records of the Department of Legislative Administrative Services.

Prior to last month’s raise, the most recent increase in per diem for federal workers and Kansas legislators came in 2013, when it went from $123 to $129, said Legislative Services Director Tom Day.

Lawmakers are entitled to the per diem allowance for every day they’re in session and every day they attend an interim committee meeting between sessions, Day said.

With 165 legislators meeting for a scheduled 90 days, the overall increase in per diem for the annual regular sessions will cost the state about $163,000 – not counting interim committees and extra days if the session runs long.

This year, each lawmaker was entitled to 114 days of subsistence payments for the annual session – about $14,500 per legislator.

A few lawmakers declined the per diem benefit from the start, and others started turning down the money as the difficult session stretched toward its record-setting duration this year, Day said.

Not always spent

The per diem money is the legislators’ to keep, whether they actually spend it on living expenses or not.

And it doesn’t always get spent.

On a nearly daily basis during the session, lawmakers have access to lunches paid for by trade associations or lobbyists. The lunch sponsor is routinely announced on the House floor just before the break.

There are also frequent lobbying receptions held in the evenings, where legislators eat and drink for free.

In addition, many lawmakers share discounted long-stay-rate hotel rooms or inexpensive apartments near the Statehouse during the session to keep their living expenses down.

Lawmakers living within driving distance of the Capitol who sleep in their own beds at night receive the same per diem benefits, although for them, it’s taxable income, Day said.

Legislators who live outside a 100-mile radius of the Capitol receive the per diem benefit tax-free, Day said.

The Legislative Coordinating Council, a group of House and Senate leaders who run the Statehouse between sessions, made a midyear adjustment in the Legislature’s budget on Monday. That “will save more than $24,000 over what was previously approved,” according to House Speaker Ray Merrick.

But they didn’t make any change in the money the legislators get.

An efficiency study, originally budgeted for $3 million, came in at $2.6 million. That $400,000 in savings was almost entirely consumed by rising information-technology expenses, leaving the $24,000 difference, Merrick spokeswoman Rachel Whitten said.

Rep. Ron Ryckman Jr., R-Olathe and chairman of the joint House-Senate Legislative Budget Committee, said the automatic increase “definitely brings up a good question to take a look at, the total compensation, the per diem as well as the daily pay.”

Ryckman said the House has cut the overall expense somewhat by eliminating some interim committees and scheduling meetings so that lawmakers who serve on more than one committee can attend two meetings on one day’s worth of salary and per diem.

“It’s something we’ll be open to discuss as a committee if the members of the Legislature want to address it,” he said. “I can say for myself and most colleagues that folks aren’t there for the money, they’re there because they want to serve the state.”

Rep. Jim Ward, D-Wichita and a member of the Pensions and Benefits Committee, said the escalator clause for legislators was originally part of a larger package of changes made in 2008 to bring state employees’ compensation up to market levels.

“Now what has happened is the extreme conservatives came to town and took apart a lot of the stuff we did that benefited state employees,” Ward said. “I think they just didn’t know this piece was in there back in the day, and (the increases) are happening now. It is what it is.”

He said he wouldn’t support cutting legislative pay or per diem, because lower compensation would make it more difficult for anyone but retirees and the independently wealthy to serve.

Ward said the problem isn’t that legislators are paid too much but that the state doesn’t have enough money to meet its other responsibilities. He blames tax cuts ushered in by Gov. Sam Brownback and the conservative Republican-dominated Legislature, including the complete elimination of state income taxes for owners of pass-though businesses including limited liability companies and Subchapter S corporations.

On Friday, revenue estimators projected that the state government will have to slice $279 million from this year’s spending because of reduced tax income collections and another $436 million in the next fiscal year.

“We should do the right thing and do our job and address the problem, which is 335,000 people not paying state income taxes while using services,” Ward said. “We should fix the budget. We should stop pitting children against prisons, or disabled against healthy, or roads against higher education, or legislators against employees.”

This story was originally published November 12, 2015 at 11:16 AM with the headline "Kansas legislators get automatic 8.5 percent raise in their allowance."