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What did they do to state Sen. Tom Glass in order to get him to recant and proclaim that his fellow legislators are decent and public-spirited?
While announcing that he would not run again, Glass said
that the legislature does not serve the interests of the
public very well.
Many of our representatives and
senators hold jobs with trade associations, and they
sometimes have difficulty separating their interests
from the interests of the people who elected them.
Just a few days later, Glass came to his senses and apologized. How did they make him change his mind? Stick hot bamboo splints under his fingernails? Lock him in a room with Ted Strickland? Force him to spend an hour listening to recorded Sam Zakhem speeches?
Before recanting, Glass did name some names, among them Sen. Cliff Dodge.
Dodge, an executive with the Colorado Broadcasters Association, was one of those legislators who Glass said held a part-time job which could involve conflicts with legislative duties. Some senators, Glass said, have voted on matters that directly affect their business clients.
How might this work? Suppose you need a certain law
passed to benefit your trade or profession. If you just
paid $10,000 in unmarked small bills to Sen. Ananias to
promote the law you want, you'd get in trouble. That's
bribery. However, your trade association could engage Sen.
Ananias as its director of governmental affairs,
and
pay him $10,000 for this part-time job. That's legal.
Cliff Dodge believes that legislators should hold part-
time jobs for trade associations. That makes for a
citizen legislature.
And the lawmakers need the
money. Without one of these trade-association jobs, a
senator might have to get by on $17,000 a year, plus $70 a
day in expenses while in session.
You can't live on $17,000 a year,
Dodge said.
How much do people live on?
The local school district budget is checked very closely by the state authorities, so I presume that its wage scales meet state approval. A starting teacher in Salida gets about $16,000 a year.
If you can't live on $17,000 for four months' work, it stands to reason that you can't live on $16,000 for nine months' work. Cliff Dodge ought to be trying to raise teacher salaries.
The most recent figure I could find for the average annual wage for all people who work in Colorado is $18,102, barely over the $17,000 that Cliff Dodge can't live on.
This means that almost half the workers in Colorado cannot live on what they're being paid. I was fully aware of this when I was an employee, and I'm painfully aware since I started free-lancing. There is some consolation; state employees share this inability to live on their wages -- their average annual salary, according to the most recent figures at hand, was $15,051.
So Cliff Dodge should be planning to raise state
salaries, as well as the minimum wage for all jobs. The
federal government has set the minimum at $3.35 an hour,
but there's no reason that the state can't increase its
minimum to something livable. Just to raise the mininum to
Dodge's can't live on
standard would bring everyone
up to $8.17 an hour.
Working steadily at the current minimum wage means a yearly gross of $6,968. Which doesn't seem like much to live on, but there are people who get by on less.
One if them is a welfare mother down the street from me. The state of Colorado, of which Cliff Dodge is an official, expects her and her two sons to live on $347 a month, plus $165 a month in food stamps. That comes to $6,144 a year.
Cliff Dodge says you can't live on $17,000, let alone the $6,144 that the state expects a woman to raise a family on. But he and his poverty-stricken fellow legislators sure don't seem to be in any hurry to make sure that people can live in Colorado. It's probably because they're so busy at their part-time jobs -- the jobs that allow them to understand the cares and concerns of Colorado citizens, or at least the concerns of citizens who can't live on $17,000 a year.
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