Hey pols, keep the $300 and buy a clue

Gov. Patrick trims legislative salaries

by Howie Carr
Thursday, Jan. 6, 2011

A $300 pay cut for the Legislature? Gov. Patrick, is this some kind of joke?

Six bucks a week? As in, that was how much the tolls were supposed to go up a few years back for most commuters, and somebody like Jim Aloisi scoffed and said it was only a sandwich a week.

So six bucks a week was nothing when it was coming out of our hides, but now that it’s coming out of yours, it’s... symbolism.

You want some symbolism, solons — let me give you a symbolic number.

The number is 100. You might even call it iconic. One hundred dollars, as in, the annual pay of a New Hampshire legislator. You know, New Hampshire, the state with no income tax and no sales tax.

Massachusetts has a 6.25 percent sales tax and a 5.3 percent income tax, and our reps’ base pay — and probably half of them are now at least $7,500 above because of their “leadership bonuses” — is now $61,133.

What is wrong with this picture?

I suppose any cut is better than nothing, but a savings of $65,000 is thin gruel indeed. Another Felon Finneran scheme goes awry — back in 1996 none of the hacks ever assumed their pay would go down, but now it has. But only until something can be worked out, perhaps by jacking up the per diem, the daily travel allowance that ranges between $10 and $110. After all, the price of gas is going up.

So, they get base pay of $61G, probably half of them (including everyone in the Senate) gets that “bonus,” the third that live more than 50 miles from the State House get a $150-a-day write-off every day the Legislature is in session.

Then there are the per diems, and the campaign-finance accounts that pay for their cars and their cell phones and their bar tabs and every other damn thing . . .

Three hundred buck pay cut?

This new year is getting off to a rather strange start at the State House. The Parole Board is enmeshed in scandal, and has the Globe even mentioned that the chairman is a former cop who was Deval’s driver in the 2006 campaign? (That’s OK, we’ve mentioned it enough for both papers.)

The new, unindicted speaker, up to his eyeballs in the Probation Department scandal, is now screaming about parole — call it Operation Change the Subject.

Deval, meanwhile, says let’s not rush to judgment, meaning don’t rush to judgment about me.

All the statewide officeholders below Deval will be sworn in on Jan. 19. That’s the first anniversary of Marsha Coakley’s stomping in the special Senate election by Scott Brown. Marsha has decided to be sworn in on the big day at the Perkins School for the Blind. No, I’m not making this stuff up.