'Unpaid' New Mexico legislators still receive pensions

SANTA FE ? Unpaid legislator is a term closer to fiction than fact.

New Mexico's lawmakers, called citizen legislators because they work for no salary, still qualify for state pensions after five years in office.

Rep. Dennis Kintigh says the system is a too generous toward those in power.

Kintigh, R-Roswell, has filed two bills to reform laws that potentially will provide pensions for himself, the other 111 sitting legislators and the lieutenant governor.

One of his bills would raise the minimum age to 62 for legislators to collect state pensions. Currently, a legislator of any age with at least 14 years of service qualifies for a state pension.

"I just don't think it's right that people in their 40s or 50s can receive a retirement benefit like that," Kintigh said in an interview.

His other bill would increase a legislator's contributions toward his or her pension from $500 to $600 a year. Kintigh is reviving that measure. It cleared the House of Representatives last year before being amended in the Senate and then dying as the session expired.

Kintigh, who turns 60 this year, said he is not opposed to legislators receiving a pension at a typical retirement age. He is contributing $500 annually to the fund in hopes that he someday will draw a pension check.

Kintigh does not qualify yet because he is only in his fourth year in the state House of Representatives.

But his discontent is that younger people who are still working can tap into pensions

for their legislative service.

New Mexico legislators are not salaried, so their pensions are calculated on their years in office and the daily expense allotments they receive when they are in session or on official business.

The reimbursement rate for legislators' expenses was $153 a day as of Dec. 31.

The pension formula is long and tangled, but for now it works out to about $1,000 for every year of legislative service.

Calculating the pensions goes like this: The starting point is 11 percent of the $153 daily expense money. That comes to $16.83. That amount is then multiplied by 60 and further multiplied by a legislator's years of service.

It means that someone who served for 10 years would receive an annual legislative pension of $10,098 a year. Twenty-five years in office would mean a pension of $25,245.

Most states pay their legislators a modest salary in addition to providing them with daily expense money.

In Texas, for instance, the $7,200-a-year salary for legislators has not changed since 1876. But legislators' daily expense payments have continued to climb all through the years. Those amounts are added to a legislator's salary total when pensions are calculated.

As a result, pension payments for Texas lawmakers have jumped to about six times their annual salary.

Two former Texas legislators who represented El Paso, Sen. Eliot Shapleigh and Rep. Norma Chavez, each qualified for annual pensions of more than $40,000 after leaving office 2011.

In South Carolina, Republican Gov. Nikki Haley has advocated changing a similar pension system for legislators, saying it was far more lucrative than the ordinary worker's.

Legislative pensions in South Carolina are based on an annual salary of $10,400, plus another $12,000 in yearly expense money that each lawmaker receives. Combining those two drives up the size of pensions.

Haley also was upset because some lawmakers were collecting pensions while still in office.

By comparison, New Mexico's system is tame, but still not right, according to Kintigh.

Records at the Legislative Council show that the first pensions for New Mexico legislators were approved in 1963.

This led to court battles over the wisdom and morality of paying legislators who supposedly worked as citizen volunteers.

The litigation eventually ended with the legislators' pension system being upheld as legal.

Kintigh's proposal to raise the age of legislators to 62 before they could collect a pension is House Bill 41.

His bill to increase a legislator's contribution to the pension fund by $100 a year is HB 42.

He has pre-filed both bills in hopes that they will be heard in the legislative session that begins Jan. 17.

Source: http://www.daily-times.com/farmington-news/ci_19702875?source=rss

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