You can’t beat a magistrate’s pay

Opinion

November 3, 2009

Opinion

Anonymous The Commonwealth Journal Tue Nov 03, 2009, 10:15 AM EST

It’s no small wonder a field full of candidates is seeking the office of magistrate in next year’s local elections. You can’t beat the pay!

A magistrate’s compensation is better than good. Matter of fact, the pay is beyond excellent. Truthfully, it’s exorbitant.

Few people realize that each magistrate on Pulaski Fiscal Court is paid at a rate that exceeds your family doctor, and a magistrate can hold a full-time job on the side. Some of them do.

A magistrate makes $2,800 a month, based on a $30,000 annual salary and $3,600 annual expenses that he doesn’t have to document. That’s $33,600 a year.

Let’s be generous with our calculations. Fiscal court meets twice a month, usually about an hour. The court convenes at 10 a.m. and they’re always done by noon.

We’re not counting times they adjourn to a local restaurant for lunch, a move not legal if a quorum is breaking bread and county business is discussed. If they don’t talk county business, then it’s OK if they enjoy each other’s company. We’re not invited to the lunch sessions, so we can’t point a finger.

As we said, let’s be overly fair and give each magistrate four hours a month in session at fiscal court. That a generous total of the time they spend around the table.

Divide four hours into a magistrates $2,800 a month compensation and that figures to $700 an hour. Hey, even your family doctor doesn’t get paid this much!

Oh yeah, we know. Somebody’s going to say you don’t know what you’re talking about. Those poor overworked magistrates are constantly harassed by telephone calls from constituents.

No doubt this is true, but it doesn’t count. Andrew Hartley, attorney for the Kentucky Department for Local Government, says “ ... generally magistrates have no power outside fiscal court (meetings). “A magistrate as an individual has no power except to act at fiscal court meetings.”

No longer is a magistrate allowed to ride road equipment in his district and direct improvements. If telephone calls from voters become a bother, complainants should be invited to present their problem to a fiscal court session where action can be taken.

A lot of people take telephone calls at night. We’re most familiar with the newspaper business and unhappy readers are not above calling an editor at home to express his or her displeasure. It’s part of the territory, and an editor’s hours are long every day, and on weekends too. And we don’t get a magistrate’s rate of pay, not by a long shot.

The scary thing about all this is that a magistrate constitutionally can make as much as the county judge-executive. Pulaski County Judge-executive Barty Bullock currently is paid an annual salary of $86,436. At least he shows up for work every day.

The possible compensation, not lost on magistrates, becomes a mighty tempting issue. It is true our current magistrates are making just a little more than a third of what the law allows them to make.

Magistrates can’t raise their own salaries. They can, however, prior to the first Monday in May in the year of their election (next year), set salaries for magistrates during the next four-year term beginning in January 2011.

To the credit of our current magistrates, they have not publicly mentioned raising pay for fiscal court members. What frightens us is they could legally raise each of their pay to $86,436 a year. We’ve got five magistrates and that would top out at $432,188 out of the county’s budget. They would be totally unaffordable and unacceptable.

We don’t mean to suggest that any magistrate is thinking along these lines. We certainly hope not. Five magistrates at the current pay rate of $33,600 each drains $168,000 a year from the county’s budget. That’s too much for five part-time jobs.

We’ve said before that the county’s 1 cent payroll tax is a blessing. It has moved Pulaski County from a poverty stricken Appalachian area to be one of the more affluent counties in Kentucky. We have great fire protection, one of the state’s best ambulance services and a modern 9-1-1 communication system. Most of us are happy to pay the occupational tax, but we don’t like to see any local official overcompensated.

We believe the greatest plank in any current magisterial candidate’s campaign would be a promise not to raise magistrates’ salaries. A promise not to raise salaries would get votes and a promise to lower the salaries would be fit for a winner.

Let us make ourselves perfectly clear. The magistrates’ current compensation was set by a previous fiscal court within the legal timeline. The pay is legal, but in our opinion the money for these big salaries comes from hard-working people, some of whom make a paltry minimum wage ... and some are collecting unemployment benefits because of the current ecomony. It just doesn’t seem fair.

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