Ghost-Gate, My Final Thoughts

May 18th, 2008 by Jake Hatlin | Posted in The House Gone Mad |

How silly this saga has grown, dangerously silly.  And I do mean that with all seriousness, Ghost-Gate has moved out of the grey areas of pending disaster and is now teetering right on the edge of the cliff. 

What started out as one article mentioning three lawmakers has now led to multiple lawmakers flying off the handle, more articles in light of that frenzy, open record requests, Lon Burnam calling out specific employees of the Speaker, and for BOR to offer a bounty for those who can snap a shot of Speaker staffers who are not properly chained to their desk for what BOR calculates as a 45 hour work week with no break periods at all.

Frankly, I’m over all this, and I wish everyone else was too.  People are quick to say that government should run more like private business, yet those same critics now want to instigate some system of “make sure they’re at their desks a full 40 hours a week - every week - or else hang them” system of employee time tracking that private business would reject on the spot.  Since some goofs out there can’t get over this, I am going to offer what will hopefully be my last commentary on this topic.

Be Careful of What You Wish For

In my mind, that simple statement is what this boils down to. I find this convenient that this is all going down in an interim year with absolutely no mention what so ever to the grueling hours that legislative staffers log during legislative and (since they have been so popular as of late) special sessions. Since we live in a world where you can’t have it both ways, let me tell you exactly why it would be counter productive to have legislative staff meticiously count their hours on the job.

First off, like many professions, I would wager that they sometimes have to take their work home with them.  I can’t imagine a one of our legislative staffers being on the couch at seven p.m., watching a phone call come in from their boss and turning a cold shoulder as it goes to voicemail.  So how do you accurately track those hours?  What system takes homework into account?

Next, you have to consider session itself.  Your typical legislative staffer probably puts in something close to an average of sixty hours a week during the five month session.  Typically, they are in the office well before their bosses, and the last to walk out the door as well.  Sure, some log more hours than others, and the first half of session can be a bit lighter than the back half, but on the whole, the number sixty is probably appropriate for this exercise.

Now, if we make them count their hours down to the last minute like they’re lawyers grinding away in a big firm, then what you’re going to have come June is about five hundred state employees with roughly ten weeks worth of comp time on their hands.  Ten…freakin…weeks! 

You think the math doesn’t add up, check it yourself.  Twenty extra hours a week times a twenty week session is four hundred comp hours, then divided by a standard forty hour work week equals ten weeks of paid time off.

That is sick to think.

So then what happens is your session only hires (probably about half) break the bank when they leave the pink dome shortly after the lawmakers scurry out of town and on their way out the door they take cash for that paid time off.  Could you imagine?  Say your average session only hire makes just five hundred dollars a week (probably low).  If you multiply that by ten paid weeks of accrued comp time, you get each of those two hundred fifty staffers walking away with an extra five thousand in their pockets, all paid for by Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Taxpayer. Ouch.

And the other half?  Fortunately we don’t have to pay them, but the trade-off is that they are left to come up with uber-creative reasons to burn through their ten weeks of no-questions-asked leave time, and we are left shaking our heads, asking, “God, what monster have we created?”.

So what is the answer?  I can’t say that I fully know.  I would hate to suggest something with zero accountability, but at the same time, the opposite spectrum is equally (if not more) distasteful.

Here’s a crazy idea.  How about just leaving it up to the people to vote their lawmaker out if they think he or she isn’t running an office setup that satisfies their needs and at a reasonable price to pay?  I know it’s old school, but isn’t that accountability enough?