REGIONAL— Political attack ads that claim area DFL legislators voted to boost their pay by $15,000 in 2019 are patently false. That’s according to Joe Boyle, an International Falls attorney and DFL party chair in Koochiching County.
The attacks have appeared in fliers and have aired on both radio and television in recent days as the campaign for northeastern Minnesota legislative seats has ramped up. The general election is set for Tuesday, Nov. 8 and early voting is already underway.
At issue is the claim, pushed by both the Republican House Campaign Committee and the Republican Party of Minnesota, that District 3A Rep. Rob Ecklund and District 6B Rep. Dave Lislegard voted to give themselves an enormous pay raise in 2019.
Legislators did receive a substantial pay raise, that took effect in 2017 and another much smaller increase in 2019. But lawmakers didn’t vote on those increases. Instead, an independent commission established by a constitutional amendment approved overwhelmingly by the state’s voters in 2016, made that call, and lawmakers— even those who said they opposed the increase— ultimately agreed they had no choice in the matter.
Boyle agreed, and he should know since he sits on the 16-member legislative salary commission created following the adoption of the constitutional amendment. The amendment, which was designed to take pay raises out of the hands of legislators, required the governor and the Supreme Court chief justice to each appoint eight members of the commission, with a total of two representing each of the state’s eight congressional districts.
“These Republican groups are spreading plain lies,” said Boyle. “No legislator voted for a pay increase.” Salary commission members, comprised of an equal number of DFLers and Republicans, did vote, unanimously according to Boyle, to approve each of the pay increases enacted since the commission was created in late 2016. The commission approved a $13,380 increase in 2017, followed by a $1,500 (not $15,000) pay increase in 2019 and a $1,750 boost in 2021. Those increases still leave lawmakers’ pay well below that of other state officials. While lawmakers are supposed to be part-time, that’s hardly the case for legislators from northern Minnesota, whose districts in some cases are larger than many eastern states, which means lawmakers, like Ecklund, spend many hours traveling the district when the Legislature isn’t in session.
Retiring Third District Sen. Tom Bakk remembers the process to create the salary commission very well and said he helped push for its creation to take the politics out of legislative salaries. For nearly 20 years, fear of attack ads from political rivals kept lawmakers’ salaries stuck at $31,140, an amount that often failed to cover lost wages for legislators who needed to work for a living.
“It was hard to recruit qualified candidates if they needed to take a pay cut to come to the Legislature,” said Bakk. “How can you ask people to do that to their families? You should at least be able to replace lost wages.”
Eckund was sanguine about the attacks and sees such questionable claims as a sign he’s making a difference. “I think I’ve done a pretty good job as a state legislator,” he said. “They really can’t come after me with anything other than this BS.”
Lawmakers did vote to put the constitutional amendment up for a vote of the people in the 2016 election, but the matter was hardly controversial at the time, as 76 percent of Minnesota voters backed the change. And Ecklund, who took office in a 2015 special election following the death of David Dill, was brand new to the Legislature at the time of the vote. Lislegard, first elected in 2018, wasn’t even in the Legislature at the time.
The false attacks on area lawmakers are being made by the Republican Party of Minnesota and the Republican House Campaign Committee. The Timberjay reached out to both entities for comment, but received no response.
Bakk, who was setting up a new winter residence in Nevada this week, said the attacks were unfair, particularly since neither Ecklund nor Lislegard played a role in the decision. “I was kind of hoping this kind of thing wouldn’t happen anymore,” he said, and he blames a sometimes gullible public for not seeing through such political smears. “We see these negative attacks, unfortunately, because they work,” he said.
While former GOP House Speaker Kurt Daudt tried to block the pay increases when first implemented in 2017, he later relented, acknowledging that the constitutional amendment took the matter out of the hands of lawmakers. “In light of recent court rulings and with the advice of counsel, it has become increasingly clear that the Minnesota House is constitutionally required to pay legislators the prescribed amount,” he told the Star Tribune in July of 2017.
Daudt, who leads the Republican campaign effort in the House, didn’t respond to questions from the Timberjay about his own committee’s latest attacks on DFL legislators, but he did respond back in 2018, when a DFL campaign flier accused a GOP lawmaker of voting to raise her own salary.
“Minnesota Democrats are so desperate to win, they’re willing to lie to Minnesotans to get elected,” said Daudt in a statement at the time. “Fortunately, Minnesotans are smarter than this— these dishonest ads will backfire,” Daudt predicted.
Boyle is hoping that’s the case this time around. “At some point we just have to say the lying has to stop,” he said.