How much does your legislator cost?

The Birmingham News has done a bang up job researching and reporting on the double dippers working for us on Goat Hill and the two-year college system and they continued that series yesterday with a damning piece on Rep. Ken Guin today.  The details are just shameful.

Guin is employed by two of Alabama’s two-year colleges as a “regional coordinator of business and industry” – whatever that is.  He receives paychecks from the two schools totaling almost $100k per year.  That princely sum was “earned” by providing a handful of two and three page papers to the colleges.  He often gave each school the exact same report.

Once the B’ham News “outed” Guin last year as a double dipper he increased the number of correspondences with the schools.  He began submitting reports as long as six or seven pages up to twice a month.  $100k just doesn’t get you what it used to I guess.

Despite serving as a part time employee Guin received tenure in our two-year college system in 2003, which means he’ll be hard to fire and will probably drain more money from the coffers of our state with that retirement plan in addition to whatever he gets as a legislator.

Guin also had not signed a contract with Shelton for last year until the publicity about his two college jobs, records show. And he had not had regular annual employee evaluations, records show. Guin signed his only annual evaluation in his Shelton State personnel file on March 3, records show.

He doesn’t even have performance evaluations!  He basically just tells the two-year colleges to keep paying his rental fee salary and not ask any questions.  It almost seems like Guin is mocking us.  It must amuse him to see how many ways he can screw over Alabamians and keep getting reelected.

Guin claims that one of his roles as “regional coordinator of business and industry” is to seek out federal funding.  But both schools already pay between $2,500 and $5,000 a month to a lobbying firm for that specific purpose.  One of Guin’s reports shows either a poor knowledge of our federal delegation or sloppiness unbecoming of a glorified $100k per year lobbyist ”regional coordinator of business and industry.”  He refers to Rep. Spencer Bachus as “Sen. Bachus.”  Hey, I make mistakes here frequently so I’m not claiming to be perfect, but I do this in my spare time for no money.  I assure you that if I made $100k per year for this you would see a much more polished product.

Guin also just voted for a 62% pay raise for himself and the other legislators.  I guess milking the Alabama taxpayers for $100k plus his original legislative salary just weren’t enough to supplement his earnings as a lawyer.

For those of you who don’t understand why double dipping is a problem remember that our state government, like the federal government, has three branches: executive, legislative, and judicial.  As a legislator, Guin is obviously in the legislative branch.  But the two-year college system is under the purview of the executive branch, which means that Guin serves two masters.  It undermines the notion of checks and balances.  It allows Guin and all the other 36 double dippers to vote for pay raises and benefit increases for themselves in two different capacities.  Those increases in expenditures often have to be funded by tax increases, which they can vote for.