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Senate passes employee pay plan with legislator raises intact • Daily Montanan [1]

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Date: 2025-03-20

Montana senators overwhelmingly voted this week in favor of a bill implementing the state’s 2026-27 employee pay plan — which includes substantial raises for state legislators.

“I’ve been around here a long time, and we’ve always, in my view, undervalued and sold ourselves short as legislators,” said Sen. John Esp, R-Big Timber, who is carrying the measure through the Senate. “We leave home, we come up here, and then we volunteer our time, basically to serve the public … I realize there’s other points of view, but we are valuable.”

The employee pay plan, carried in House Bill 13 each session, is negotiated between the governor’s office and public employees’ unions, and usually passes the Legislature with strong bipartisan support.

The legislation authorizes raises for the state workforce, increasing health insurance payments, adjusting per diem travel rates and raising legislator salaries in line with other public employees.

However, this session the bill has ruffled some feathers in both chambers by adding in a separate provision to boost future legislators’ salaries by tying them to Montana’s average salary — a controversial inclusion.

Sen. Sue Vinton, R-Billings, brought forth an amendment to strip out the legislator pay raise from the bill.

Last session, Vinton said, a standalone bill was passed to increase legislator pay from $16 to roughly $24 an hour and was “met with a very public rebuke by the governor.”

“‘As has been the case since before our nation’s founding, public service comes with personal sacrifice — long hours away from home, less time with family, and appropriately limited compensation,’” Vinton quoted from Gov. Greg Gianforte’s veto letter.

Esp suggested that feelings in the governor’s office may have changed over the biennium.

The governor during a Thursday morning press conference said the employee pay plan needed to pass and had been a fair compromise with the unions. He also said that “we put the pay raise for the legislators in the bill as well,” but added that the legislature has the final say in the bill.

Gianforte’s office did not respond to more specific questions from the Daily Montanan about whether he would sign the bill as is.

The pay plan for state and Montana University System Employees calls for either a $1-per-hour or 2.5% raise, whichever is greater, for each of the next two years, effective July 1.

The plan also increases the state’s per diem meal rates by tying them to 70% of the standard federal rate of reimbursement — bumping up each meal roughly from $3 to $4 dollars — and boosts employer health insurance contributions by $26 in 2026 and an additional $27 in 2027.

Crucially, and the reason for spirited debate on the Senate floor Wednesday, sponsor and Rep. John Fitzpatrick, R-Anaconda, added in a provision to make lawmaker pay a function of the state’s average wage, which he said on the House floor would stop the legislature from debating the issue every two years.

Legislators currently earn $16.11 an hour — a number that would go up along with all state employees if the pay plan passes on its own — equivalent wages to an annual salary of $33,900.

Under HB 13, lawmakers during the 2027 session would earn the equivalent of 80% of the state average hourly wage, and during the 2029 session would make 100% of the state hourly wage.

According to the latest Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the mean hourly wage in Montana across all occupations was $26.88 in 2023, or $55,920 annually.

The bill would increase the state’s payroll costs by roughly $41 million a year, including the standard increase for legislators. The additional cost of changing legislator salaries to tie them to the state average would be $1.4 million and $2.2 million during the next two years.

The cost of increasing health plans are $2.9 million and $7.9 million respectively during the next two years.

Sen. Jonathan Windy Boy, D-Box Elder, spoke against the amendment to strike the legislator pay raise, saying that in his 13 sessions serving in Helena, legislator pay has inched up while the cost of living has skyrocketed — he said his housing costs had roughly tripled in the Capitol.

“Our pay here and the cost of living does not equate to one another. And not only that, I’m away from home, four months, from my residence, and I still have to pay all of those expenses, and so as this is just to double the burden on me personally,” Windy Boy said.

But several Republican legislators sided with Vinton, saying that voting for their own pay increases was unnecessary, not what Montanans wanted, and just plain looked bad.

“What if this was a referendum? What if this issue, legislator pay, was on the ballot? How do you think that would go?” asked Sen. Forrest Mandeville, R-Columbus. “… We’re in a unique situation. How many other people would love to be in the situation where they can vote for their own pay increase?”

“I’m not a fan,” he said.

Sen. Daniel Zolnikov, R-Billings, said money should not be the motivation for serving in the lawmaking body, adding that opponents’ arguments that only independently wealthy, retired, or remote-working individuals could afford to serve were misguided.

“I lived on nothing when I was in the House, if you knew me, and I loved serving this place. And I still do, because it was about being in here, ideas, philosophies, concepts,” Zolnikov said. “…We never used to do this. We got stopped doing this. This is service.”

Zolnikov added last session the Legislature voted to increase the per diem rate legislators get paid while in session — to $206 per day in addition to a salary of $128.86 a day — which should be enough to offset living expenses.

But proponents of legislator raises continually returned to the idea that a citizen legislature should more closely represent the population, and prospective lawmakers should have the means to take the time to serve.

“What this bill will do is allow more young parents, for example, to join right? It will allow people with different perspectives who wouldn’t be able to take time off because they simply don’t have the privilege of the support networks that we all do,” Sen. Cora Neumann, D-Bozeman, said. “I just think that if we can do something like this, we’re going to have a wider and higher quality of bills. I think that’s going to make this body have much more depth people are bringing from their own personal experience.”

Esp agreed it would widen the pool.

“It’s getting more difficult to find people that are willing to serve that aren’t retired like I am, or that have some other jobs that they can do from both places, or they’re just making a great sacrifice to be here,” Esp said. “I think it’s high time we recognize that.”

The amendment failed 12-38, and the full employee pay plan passed the chamber 37-13.

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[1] Url: https://dailymontanan.com/2025/03/20/senate-passes-employee-pay-plan-with-legislator-raises-intact/

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