Twenty-five of the 200 political staff members to Alaska's lawmakers during their annual legislative session earned monthly salaries equivalent to more than $100,000 annually, with 70 paid at rates of $84,000 or more.
The salaries have drawn scrutiny recently after disclosures of the arrests of two staffers, one who earned $125,000 and another who earned $94,000. Top legislators said in interviews afterwards that individual hiring and pay decisions are largely left to each of the 60 lawmakers in the Legislature -- though they also cited some guidelines set by leaders in the House and Senate, and by state law.
Staffers' salaries are fixed to a state pay scale chosen by the legislator who hires them, with starting rates generally between $51,500 and $95,000. Then, raises are awarded automatically every year or two years -- similar to the raises awarded to other state employees based on experience.
It used to take as long as five years for staffers to earn their automatic raises once they'd accumulated several years of experience, and those raises stopped after about 15 years of service. But legislators voted in 2008 to change the salary rules.
Currently, staff members at the top pay scale with a decade or more of experience can make $120,000 a year or more -- more than double legislators' own $50,400 salaries, and close to the $140,000 annual salaries paid to the many of the heads of state agencies.
That includes high-profile lawmakers' top aides, like Tom Wright, the $134,000-a-year chief of staff to House Speaker Mike Chenault, R-Nikiski. But it also includes employees of legislators who aren't in leadership, like Katrina Matheny, a staffer for Sen. Gary Stevens, R-Kodiak, and Juli Lucky, who works for Rep. Mike Hawker, R-Anchorage.
Both Matheny and Lucky are paid $120,000 annually, before the calculation of benefits, which typically amount to about one-third of a staffer's salary, plus another $16,000 for health care.
Stevens said in a phone interview last week that he hasn't seen substantial changes to the salary system since his time as Senate president, which ended in 2012. He and other legislators said staffers should be well-compensated based on their responsibilities keeping a part-time Legislature running -- and their tenuous status working for an elected official who can be voted out of office.
"That's the system that's developed over the years," Stevens said. "We really depend on them. They work hard, and they are well-paid -- certainly the senior ones. But I think they well deserve the pay they get."
Minority, majority differences
The Legislature's personal services budget -- staffing costs that also include lawmakers' nonpartisan employees like attorneys and researchers -- grew to $55.5 million this year from $36.5 million in 2008, or about 52 percent.
By comparison, the same line item grew by 31 percent over the same period for the governor's office, 35 percent for the state's administration department and 23 percent for the state's Department of Natural Resources.
Legislative leaders allot staff members to themselves and to others based on a point system that uses rank, position and party affiliation. Lawmakers get a limited number of salary points to allot to their employees, and placing a staffer on a higher pay scale costs more points.
Members of the Republican-led majorities in the House and Senate get extra points to pay employees who coordinate committee work -- but they also are allotted enough points to pay each of their employees higher salaries.
And the majorities also allot themselves more support staff, at higher pay. The House and Senate Democratic minorities each had one press staffer and shared a webmaster during the legislative session, all at a pay range with a starting salary that equates to $71,700 annually. The webmaster's actual salary is $88,000 -- substantially more than the listed started salary because of his experience.
The House majority, meanwhile, had two Web staffers, one at a pay range with a listed starting salary of $81,800, though his actual salary is $117,000. It also had two press staffers at similar pay ranges.
The Senate majority had three press staffers during the legislative session, two at the highest pay range allowed, with a starting salary set at $87,600. Their actual salaries were $90,700 and $93,700.
The pay discrepancy between the majority and minority is longstanding and existed before Republicans controlled both chambers of the Legislature as they do now, said Rep. Craig Johnson, R-Anchorage, a member of House leadership as chair of the Rules Committee.
Asked why it was justified, Johnson responded that majority members "have to do a lot more."
"We have to set these budgets and we have to do these meetings," he said in a phone interview. As for the minority, he added: "They have to show up and they have their input. But the planning is not what they do, so I'm sure there's a difference in a workload."
Lawmakers are allowed more staff during the annual legislative session than the interim between sessions. Typically, sessions are 90 days, but this year's was extended nearly two months. Leaders in both the majority and minority also get more employees, as do chairs of key committees in both chambers.
Those include the finance committees, plus two more joint House-Senate committees that are responsible for audits and for the Legislature's internal business and budgets.
The finance co-chairs in the House and Senate have among the most employees and the most highly paid. A legislative salary list shows Sen. Pete Kelly, R-Fairbanks, with six employees during the session -- one was hourly -- including a budget staffer, James Armstrong, who was paid $10,400 monthly, or nearly $125,000 a year.
In the House, Rep. Mark Neuman, R-Big Lake, had the same number of employees during the legislative session, all but one of whom he placed on the highest pay scale, with a starting salary of $87,600. Neuman's most experienced staffer, budget analyst Pete Ecklund, makes nearly $125,000 annually.
Neuman, who oversees the House's work on the state operating budget, said in a phone interview that the salaries were justified by his employees' "invaluable" expertise.
"I can say with a pretty straight face that everybody on my staff has saved the state well over millions of dollars, each, in the work that they do. You've got to have the right personnel in the right positions to do that," he said. "Nobody knows the state's budgets like they do."
Hawker, who chairs the Joint Legislative Budget and Audit Committee, had five staffers during the legislative session -- four of whom were on the highest pay scale. Three earn more than $100,000 annually, based on their experience.
Who gets hired?
While some of the highest-paid staffers have worked in the Legislature for more than a decade, working for a lawmaker requires no minimum qualifications.
House and Senate leaders -- either the presiding officer or the rules committee chair, depending on whether the Legislature is in session -- have to sign off on hiring decisions. But they rarely, if ever, veto a colleague's choice.
"I've never had to do it," said Johnson, the House rules chair, though he added that he has at times encouraged members to examine a potential employee more closely. "We try to help people make sure they're hiring people that have high moral standards."
Lawmakers said their aides' salaries are merited based in part on the uncertainty and upheaval associated with their jobs. Staffers typically move from their homes to Juneau and back for the legislative session, and they can be fired at any time. Not to mention that their jobs are contingent on the public's willingness to re-hire their bosses every two or four years.
"Next year, when I'm not elected, they're out of a job. Or if I don't like the color dress or tie a person's wearing, I can let them go," Senate President Kevin Meyer, R-Anchorage, said in a phone interview. "Nobody likes to pack up their boxes twice a year, move to Juneau and move back and have their lives disrupted like that. It's hard to get somebody who's really good and will do this for you for a long time."
The Legislature's system for hiring and paying its employees seems to be "fairly sensible," said Gregg Erickson, an economist who founded and owned the Alaska Budget Report newsletter.
The publication closely scrutinized salaries of staffers and executive branch employees, and in Erickson's experience, he said, it's difficult to make an objective determination about how much a staffer is worth to a legislator.
"Who are we to get into that legislator's mind and say the reason he pays so and so that much money is because she's got big boobs? And I can tell you there's been episodes in history where I think that's been the qualification sometimes -- or that so and so is my favorite drinking buddy," Erickson said in a phone interview. "I don't think the salaries as a whole are out of line, and I don't think the salary system is all that irrational. It is, I think, a pretty good shot at trying to fairly allocate the resources for staff."
Erickson said he couldn't envision a better system for selecting and hiring legislative employees. Standardizing the process to make it look more like the civil service by choosing applicants who score best on a test, for example, probably wouldn't work well, he said.
With the state facing a multibillion-dollar budget deficit this year, lawmakers made significant cuts to their nonpartisan support staff, like to their legal and research departments.
But they didn't propose cuts to their political staff during the Legislature's budget process. Lawmakers were poised to cancel a 2.5 percent cost-of-living raise for staffers that was tied to a similar cut proposed for other state employees -- but those proposals were dropped during final budget negotiations.
Both Meyer, the Senate president, and Johnson, the House rules chair, said it might be time for lawmakers to examine staff salaries more closely.
"Maybe we need to look at these step increases," said Meyer, referring to staffers' automatic annual or biannual raises. "It's just something that's been around forever."
Johnson, meanwhile, said lawmakers would need to look at all salaries in state government, given that Alaska's budget shortfall is expected to persist for years.
"I just think we're in a different time," Johnson said. "We're in a new budget situation."