Jefferson City

March 29, 2007

House Floor Last Night

Email from Jeanette Mott Oxford last night:

We just had a lively debate on how to give state employees a raise this year. The governor called for a 3% increase across the board. The Democrats called for a flat raise of $972 per state employee instead which means that $20,000 a year workers would get a 4.9% raise, while a $100,000 per year employee would get only 1%. I carried the amendment for the Democrats and offered it on budget bills 2 and 3 and lost both on a voice vote. In the meantime a couple of GOP legislators told me that I was completely right on the issue and that they would support me if I offered it again. I offered it on budget bill 10 (mental health). A little bit of everything was drug into the debate - the cost of living, our being 50th in the nation in how we pay state employees, salary compression, the inability to recruit folks at the top if we don't pay well, high turnover in the lower wage jobs, the parable of the talents, the parable of the workers in the vinyard (and neither of those biblical allusions from me interestingly enough although I did let Rep. Emery know that a first century Jew would disagree with his interpretation of the parable of the talents), etc. I asked for a roll call right at the beginning so folks would know they would be on the record and also to increase the intensity with which people listened. In the end, my amendment lost 77-79. Three Democrats were absent or we could have won it! Though if the other three Dems had been here, the GOP leaders would have twisted arms of GOP members voting yes (eight did at the time the board closed, and more than eight did before the arm twisting began to get some to change - at one point it was a 78-78 tie).

So even if it had passed, the Senate probably would have stripped it off, but it's pretty likely that the GOP majority would have done what it took to kill it last night.

JMO