The top bosses in Utah state government are finally getting pay raises — and for a few they are healthy double-digit salary hikes.
Action by the 2007 Legislature allowed Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. to give his department heads more money as soon as the bill took effect in March — and again when the new budget year begins July 1.
Huntsman declined to speak with the Deseret Morning News about the pay hikes. But his spokeswoman, Lisa Roskelley, said the pay scales and raises reflect Huntsman's desire to "get the best of the best" to run multibillion-dollar state operations.
"You don't get rich working for the state. It really is public service, especially when you compare" the top state executives to private sector CEOs' pay or even the Utah Legislature's top pay scales or those of Salt Lake County, she said.
One of the goals of the new pay scale for top state bosses is that no longer will the Legislature yearly set the salary ranges for top executives. Huntsman and human resource executives will decide those after broad pay studies of the private and government sectors.
The change will keep legislators from punishing or rewarding individual state department heads — something that's been seen in recent years, officials said.
And the change permanently ties the amount of money the governor can pay top bosses to what their lower-ranking employees can earn — which has been more than department directors in years gone by.
Now there is no longer the chance of a repeat of what happened during the 2006 Legislature, when lawmakers failed to pass a bill that would have permitted salary increases for department heads.
There have been other problems, too, with letting lawmakers set the salaries every year.
For example, several years ago a special bill was filed to give a big raise to any physician who may be named head of the state's health department.
Huntsman and others had complained that Dr. David Sundwall, health department boss, was not being paid enough money — and that the state could not recruit a physician for that top job unless things changed. But looking at just one state boss' salary was inappropriate, some argued.
On the other side, some House members held up an executive pay bill one year until an amendment kept Agriculture Commissioner Leonard Blackham from getting a state car. As the Senate's budget chairman several years ago, before his appointment to head the Agriculture Department, Blackham angered a number of House members over his take-it-or-leave-it, budget-setting stands.
Pay for top state executives shouldn't depend on whether powerful legislators like them personally or not, or even whether they liked the job the department heads were doing or not, some state leaders said.
Top executives serve at the pleasure of the governor, and the governor alone should be deciding the pay (within a broad salary range) and perks of his top officials, the argument went.
"There's still politics," said Senate Majority Leader Curt Bramble, R-Provo, the sponsor of last session's legislation on executive compensation. "Ideally, it would take us out of it. Anybody who believes we will be completely out of it hasn't been around very long."
Bramble said his bill was intended to give the governor more flexibility to set executive salaries as well as to stop lawmakers from being lobbied for more money for department heads.
"We didn't appropriate more money to the executive branch. We just gave more discretion for the governor to set salaries for his top executives," Bramble said. "Now ... we don't have a bull's-eye with departments lobbying to say our guy deserves more money."
A look at Huntsman's top executives and their new pay levels also shows that only a handful of the Cabinet members are women.
Roskelley said Huntsman seeks to appoint top people for each post — and in some cases, like Workforce Services boss Kristen Cox and Human Services director Lisa-Michele Church (both of whom will soon be earning $123,510 a year), those are women.
Other times, he hires men.
"The governor just brought Dianne Nielson over as his personal energy adviser (the former head of the Department of Environmental Quality), and she was replaced there by Rick Sprott, who ran a division at DEQ. "
Jeff Herring, state human resources director, said the governor adjusted the salaries of state executives in March. Those who have been working the past year without a pay hike were given a cost of living increase. Some also received another pay boost.
The governor's budget director, John Nixon, was making just under $105,800 when the bill took effect in March. When the new budget years begins July 1, he'll end up with the biggest pay increase, a 20 percent boost to $126,900.
Nixon is an exception, Herring said, because he took close to a $30,000 pay cut when he left the Division of Workforce Services last year as a deputy director. It's to "try to get him back not to where he was but to say we appreciate the work," Herring said.
"When the governor asks you to serve, you serve. I was excited," Nixon said. "But I think it kind of highlighted the problem with the overall compensation system in the state because you had a lot of the deputy directors making more than the directors in the state."
Despite the pay cut, Nixon said, he couldn't turn down an opportunity to work closely with Huntsman. "We love what we do. We love working for the state," he said. "And I think we're doing good things."
State government is Utah's biggest corporation and should be staffed accordingly, Herring said. "It's a business we've got to run, and we've got to have the best and the brightest," he said.
And the state needs to pay those people at least enough to keep up with inflation, Herring said. "These executive directors would say they're not in this for the money," he said. "You don't ever go into state government to get rich."
Still, a $100,000 a year salary puts a state executive in the top 9 percent of wage-earners in Utah, the Utah Tax Commission says, and the state has one of the best medical and retirement programs around.
E-mail: bbjr@desnews.com