Salaries turn into political football

Gov. Jim Gibbons has asked state workers to take a 6 percent pay cut and pay more for health insurance, but some members of his own staff have gotten big pay increases over the past two years, prompting a public outcry.

As director of the state Nuclear Projects Agency, Bob Loux took it upon himself to bump up his own pay and that of his staff, giving himself $50,000 more than authorized over the past three years.

Meanwhile, 54 employees of the Legislative Counsel Bureau made more than $100,000 with overtime in 2007, including 18 who made more than the governor's $141,000 salary, prompting Gibbons to claim a double standard was at work in the criticism of his office.

In all cases, the salaries of state workers have become a political football. But are there differences between the situations? And with a hole in the state budget approaching $2.5 billion, why is it that a few thousand dollars in a bureaucrat's paycheck gets people all riled up?

"In the big picture of things, the governor's administrative budget is a drop in the bucket," said Assembly Majority Leader John Oceguera, D-Las Vegas. "But to people who are being asked to take a 6 percent pay cut, teachers and secretaries who are also on top of that having their benefits cut, it doesn't seem right that people in the governor's office are receiving big raises."

Gibbons' legislative director's salary of $103,382 has doubled since 2007, while his communications director's salary of $109,996 is up 28 percent from two years ago. Of the 16.5 employees in his office, 14 saw their pay increase in the past year.

Gibbons has pointed out that state law gives him the authority to set staff salaries within the budget allocated to his office. With 16.5 staffers instead of the 27 approved in 2007, individual workers have taken on additional responsibilities and been promoted to new positions. The salary increases were offset by the staff cuts, meaning the office spent 11 percent less than the allocated amount overall, and all staffers, including Gibbons, would take the 6 percent reduction if Gibbons' pay cut proposal passes.

"Certainly he can make the argument that he is authorized to do this. He controls his own budget, no doubt," Oceguera said. "He can also make the argument that he's reduced staffing, and that is true. But it (the pay raises) resonates with people when they are being laid off from their jobs, their friends and neighbors are being laid off, their co-workers. All over the public and private sector, people are being asked to do two jobs, and they're not getting a raise."

Oceguera said he has gotten dozens of angry e-mails from state workers and members of the public about the salary issue.

To Gibbons, a Republican, it does not seem fair. He says he has acted responsibly to keep spending down and has not done anything improper. The focus on his personnel when salaries are high elsewhere indicates a bias against him in the Legislature and the media, he said in an interview.

"I've promoted people, I've not given them raises," Gibbons said. "I've made them not only do the new work they're promoted into, but bring with them the job obligations that they left, and we've eliminated those jobs to the point where we have saved and returned into the general fund $175,000 this year in salaries. That $175,000 in savings seems to be missing from a lot of your media reporting. I think that ought to be the fact."

Gibbons wanted to know why critics haven't focused more on the Legislative Counsel Bureau salaries.

"There's 18 people in the state Legislature (staff) that make more than I do," he said. "They have a far worse and more egregious set of (circumstances)."

Top counsel bureau staffers can make $30,000 to $50,000 in overtime during the legislative sessions, held in odd-numbered years, on top of base pay of around $120,000 to $130,000 a year. Legislative Counsel Brenda Erdoes, the agency's legal expert, made $218,392 in 2007.

Those top staffers work a grueling schedule throughout the 120-day session, drafting bills and crunching numbers deep into the night. But Gibbons' staffers say they work hard too, especially when the Legislature is in session, and they don't get overtime at all.

The legislative branch, including the U.S. Congress and state legislatures, is exempt from the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, under which professional or salaried employees do not receive overtime pay, while non-salaried employees receive hourly overtime pay equal to 1.5 times their regular pay.

Instead, legislative employees above a certain grade get paid straight time -- their regular hourly wage -- for overtime, while those below professional grade get time-and-a-half. The rules are laid out in state statute and the regulations of the Legislative Commission, and they have been the same for decades, said Legislative Counsel Bureau Director Lorne Malkiewich, who has been with the agency since 1981 and who earned $152,335 with overtime in 2007.

"This is the way the Legislature set up its staffing to meet our needs during the interim and work people real hard during the session," he said. Though some temporary employees such as janitors, police and runners are added during the session, it's more practical to have full-time staffers who know the ropes do the bulk of the work, he said.

The counsel bureau is nonpartisan and widely esteemed in the halls of state for its expertise and professionalism. Malkiewich, in defending his own office, did not want to criticize any other, including the governor. But he pointed out that counsel bureau staffers haven't been given raises, in the middle of a recession and state budget cuts; they're getting paid according to the same rules that have dictated their pay for many years.

"We work very well with the governor's office and the budget office. I am not going to say anything bad about anyone else," Malkiewich said. "But one of the things that has maybe made that (the governor's staff's pay) stand out is that the governor's office is the one that has proposed the 6 percent cuts."

But Malkiewich said he understands the outrage of people who are struggling. "Someone who's out of a job, they're not going to want to hear my explanation, and I understand that," he said.

The legislative budget represents 1.5 percent of total state appropriations, the governor's staff budget a fraction of that. But it's not about how much is being spent; rather, it's "totally symbolic," said David Damore, a political scientist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Damore drew a parallel with the recent furor over bonuses paid to AIG executives. The $165 million in bonus payments might have been peanuts compared with the billions and trillions in bailout money being thrown around, but it resonated with an angry public because individual salaries are something everyone can relate to.

"People are saying, 'I'm not getting a raise. My house is getting foreclosed. Where's my bonus?'" Damore said. Gibbons' inability to understand that giving his own people more money while asking everyone else to make sacrifices would generate anger was another instance of "his general tone deafness," Damore said.

"The same person who is saying everybody in the state has to cut this much is saying people who work directly for me can get these big raises," he said. "And at the same time he's talking about rejecting the stimulus money for the unemployed. No matter what his explanation is, the damage is done politically."

The case of Loux, who was cleared of charges he violated ethics laws by the state Ethics Commission on a 3-2 vote last week, drew fire largely from lawmakers of both parties, who saw it as a case of an out-of-control state employee using his position for personal enrichment. It was Assembly Minority Leader Heidi Gansert, R-Reno, who filed the ethics complaint against Loux.

Loux, who served for many years as the point man in the state's fight against the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, acknowledged that he took the salary of an employee who left the office and spread it into a 16 percent pay raise for himself and his staff.

Budget Director Andrew Clinger testified that between 2006 and his retirement in January, Loux took home $55,000 more than his approved salary. Loux, however, maintained higher-ups had authorized him to increase salaries in his office.

Gansert said she was frustrated that Loux appeared to have gotten off on a technicality. "I think people want accountability," she said. "They don't want instances like this to be swept under the rug."

Loux's case is "absolutely more egregious" than Gibbons' pay increases, she said, "because he had no authority to change the salaries, whereas the governor does have discretion to change the salaries within his office. One thing you do have to say on behalf of the governor is they did present the positions and the raises so we could see what they were." Loux, she said, contrived to have his actions hidden from view.

But Gansert, who said she thought the legislative overtime pay was justified, didn't wholly defend Gibbons.

"We do not micromanage the salaries in the governor's office, and I noticed, when the information was presented to us, that he had some of the same people in different positions, while he was trying to reduce some of the staff," she said. "But I was surprised there was an increase in some of those wages. ... While we're facing these significant budget cuts, an increase in any salary needs to be reviewed and scrutinized."

To critics of Gibbons, neither Loux's case nor the issue of legislative salaries constitutes the outrage that the governor's salary hikes do because Gibbons is the one asking others to take a cut.

"I represent state employees, and they are outraged that the very person telling them he's going to cut their salary is saying that doesn't apply to the people who work for him," said Danny Thompson, secretary-treasurer of the state AFL-CIO. "Whether or not those people (in the governor's office) are doing two jobs, that doesn't matter. Some state employees are doing three jobs for the same salary."

With a hiring freeze in effect for the past two years, state offices are understaffed to a dangerous extent: The state prison system has 450 vacancies, while state welfare workers have impossible 650-case loads. With situations like these and proposals on the table like cutting the state's public universities' budgets in half, nobody should be getting a big raise, Thompson said.

Phoebe Sweet, spokeswoman for the Nevada Democratic Party, said it just goes to show how out of touch Gibbons is with ordinary Nevadans.

"This is just the latest example of Gibbons' hypocrisy," she said. "He's asking teachers and other public employees to take a pay cut, and at the same time, he's handing out exorbitant raises to his own staff.

"We're sure working for the governor isn't the greatest job in the world, but Dan Burns (Gibbons' communications director) isn't fighting fires or saving lives.

"The state is facing tough choices. He (Gibbons) should be willing to make sacrifices in his own office," she said.

Contact reporter Molly Ball at mball@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-2919.