Poll: They don't earn it

Poll: They don't earn it

By Tom Murse

Lancaster New Era

Published: Sep 16, 2005 3:57 PM EST

LANCASTER COUNTY, PA - State lawmakers have defended the middle-of-the-night pay raise they awarded themselves in July by saying they work hard, and they deserve more money.

Now for a reality check.

Their bosses — the very people who elected them — overwhelmingly disagree, according to a new statewide poll.Nearly 80 percent of voters say their lawmakers aren’t doing a good enough job to deserve the 16- to 54-percent pay raises they’re getting, the Franklin & Marshall College Keystone Poll found.

“I think people look at their lives and think they’re struggling,” said G. Terry Madonna, the director of F&M’s Center for Politics and Public Affairs. “They’re not very upbeat and optimistic, and they see the pay raise and don’t understand why it’s as high as it is.”

Pennsylvanians are increasingly concerned about skyrocketing prices for gasoline and heating oil, and more than one in three say they’re worse off financially than they were last year, the poll found. Meantime, 69 percent graded the Legislature’s job performance as only fair or poor.

“When you attach those attitudes to the size of the pay hike, you immediately get the reaction we’ve gotten, which is a pent-up kind of anger at legislators for doing this,” Madonna said.

Seventy-nine percent of the 518 registered voters surveyed this month said the pay increases were not warranted. Nearly half — 46 percent — said they would be less likely to vote for their lawmaker if they voted in favor of the raise.

The pay raise was approved without debate or public comment in the early hours of July 7, and was supported by majorities of both parties in both the House and Senate.

Six of 11 local lawmakers — Sens. Gibson Armstrong, David “Chip” Brightbill and Noah Wenger, and Reps. Roy Baldwin, Tom Creighton and Mike Sturla — voted in favor of the raise. Creighton has since apologized and said his vote was an “error in judgment.”

Sturla, one of only two who responded to the New Era today, said he is not surprised by the level of anger about the pay raise. He blamed it on incessant newspaper and radio coverage.

“I think there’s been a whole lot of misinformation about the issue,” said Sturla, a Democrat from Lancaster City. “That same night, at 2 in the morning, we passed a $625 million Growing Greener program — 150 times the cost of the pay raise.

“We passed it without any discussion, but I haven’t seen any article about that,” he said.

He acknowledged that voters have a right to be concerned about rising gas prices, dwindling funding for medical assistance for the poor and disabled, and school property-taxes.

“But there’s not an easy solution for those things,” Sturla said. “You know what there is an easy one to solve? Vote the bums out. That’s less than a 10-second sound bite. That’s the easy one to tackle at this point.

“If those complex issues were given as much air time and press time as this simple issue, we might actually get somewhere in resolving those issues,” he said.

Baldwin, a Republican from Manheim Township, said, “I personally think that the compensation is just for the level of work that we do. I’ve found out from my constituents that many of them don’t have a good idea of what an elected official does. That may have some bearing on the poll.”

Despite the outrage among voters, however, Sturla, Baldwin and most incumbents can breathe a sigh of relief about their re-election chances. When asked how their own representative voted, 64 percent said they didn’t even know.

The poll, conducted between Sept. 8 and Tuesday, carries a sampling margin of error of plus or minus 4.5 percentage points.

It was commissioned by the Philadelphia Daily News; The Patriot-News in Harrisburg; the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review; CN8, the Comcast cable network; WGAL-TV; and WTAE-TV in Pittsburgh.

© 2004-2005 Lancaster Newspapers

Source: http://local.lancasteronline.com/4/17091

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