Interview with James Thompson # IST-A-L-2013-054.10 Interview # 10: August 29, 2014 Interviewer: Mark Depue
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Interview with James Thompson # IST-A-L-2013-054.10 Interview # 10: August 29, 2014 Interviewer: Mark DePue COPYRIGHT The following material can be used for educational and other non-commercial purposes without the written permission of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. “Fair use” criteria of Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976 must be followed. These materials are not to be deposited in other repositories, nor used for resale or commercial purposes without the authorization from the Audio-Visual Curator at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, 112 N. 6th Street, Springfield, Illinois 62701. Telephone (217) 785-7955 Note to the Reader: Readers of the oral history memoir should bear in mind that this is a transcript of the spoken word, and that the interviewer, interviewee and editor sought to preserve the informal, conversational style that is inherent in such historical sources. The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library is not responsible for the factual accuracy of the memoir, nor for the views expressed therein. We leave these for the reader to judge. DePue: Today is Friday, August 29, 2014. My name is Mark DePue, director of oral history at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. Governor, this is our tenth session. And we’ve got quite a few more to go, I’m sure. Thompson: Is that a threat or a promise? (laughs) DePue: A promise. I’m looking forward to it. You might see it as a threat. We’re again at your summer home in Buchanan, just north of Buchanan, Michigan. We don’t have much sun today, but it’s otherwise a very pleasant day. Thompson: It is. DePue: And your reference was to the lawnmower outside. Thompson: Yeah, the lawn gets mowed once a week. Lawn is a misnomer. The fields get mowed once a week. (laughs) It takes about a couple of hours and three or four guys to do it. When they get up by the house it can get a little noisy, but maybe, as you say, they’ve done that already. DePue: Yesterday we finished off with the 1978 election, the second election, and you won by a very large majority, 60 percent. But in the midst of that election, May 19 actually, you promised that you would not sign any government pay raise, that you would veto any attempt for a government pay raise. You and I had talked James Thompson Interview # IST-A-L-2013-054 about this before, and my memory says that you were generally sympathetic to the need for a pay raise. Thompson: This is an issue where you can’t win. You just can’t win, politically or any other way. The plain fact is that the public is not sympathetic to increases in salary for public employees, and more specifically for high-ranking public employees: constitutional officers, cabinet members, legislators, legislative leaders. And it’s a dilemma. If the legislature votes to increase public salaries, including their own, people get mad. The press doesn’t like it, and the press jumps on it and stirs up opposition to it. We’ve tried moving the responsibility for pay raises from the legislature to a commission, but in the end, even if a commission makes a recommendation for an increase, the legislature still has to fund it. So in the end, it’s the legislature doing the final act, which opens the legislature and the constitutional officers to criticism. It’s something that the press likes to make a big deal of, and the press will stir up sentiments like, the legislators and constitutional officers are fat cats, they’re making a lot of money while people generally aren’t making that kind of money. You can’t win. So you have to do the best you can and just take the political abuse until it dies down. By “public employees” I mean the salaries of the constitutional officers and the legislature, because nobody criticizes raising the salary of the bureaucracy; they don’t even see it. The public doesn’t see that. But I happen to think that Illinois does not over-compensate its high-ranking public officials. I just shake my head every time one of these things comes up. And in this instance, I kept my promise, I vetoed the pay raise. But I did it in such a fashion that allowed the legislature to override me. DePue: Before you get that far, there’s a couple more questions I want to ask, or some clarification here. Through the late 1960s, and I would imagine through the 1970s, my impression is that the Illinois legislature was becoming more of a professional body. It was moving away from the old standard of a citizen legislator who was expected to have another job someplace else, because the legislature only met every other year or wasn’t in session most of the time, towards a model were they were becoming more professional; the staffs were growing, and they were spending the bulk of their time now being legislators. Thompson: That’s certainly true. And Illinois doesn’t stand alone in that regard; that’s happened in most of the other states of the union. There’s only a couple of states—Texas, the legislature meets only once every two years in a short session. And one of the northeastern states, maybe New Hampshire, has sort of a citizen legislature where they meet for a short time and their pay is very low, because they don’t want to encourage the professional legislator. But for the rest of the states of the union, including Illinois, we’ve moved away from what was a nineteenth-century tradition into virtually full-time legislators who are expected to devote most of their time to legislative tasks and be compensated accordingly. And as you say, the staffs have increased and become more professional. There’s no possibility of going back. 358 James Thompson Interview # IST-A-L-2013-054 DePue: And Jim Edgar would be a good example of that; pretty much his entire income was based on him being a legislator, until you made him a legislative liaison. Thompson: Right. DePue: The other thing that was putting pressure on legislative and executive pay at the time, and we’ve talked about this before as well, was the inflation rate. President Carter, by this time, asked that businesses and institutions control price and wage increases. Alfred Kahn was his inflation fighter and needed to approve things like legislative and executive pay increases. At least they thought they did. Thompson: For the federal government. He couldn’t control them for state officials. DePue: But they would have opinions about such things? Thompson: Well, sure. But that’s close to being up there with the 68 degree temperature, I think. Carter or any other president can use the bully pulpit of the presidency to try and influence public policy, even at the state or local level. But that’s all it is, is the bully pulpit of the presidency; those guidelines and Alfred Kahn and his crew couldn’t possibly interfere with the constitutional authority of the states to set their own legislative policies. Here’s an example: What would you pay a person who is responsible for administering a $12 billion budget, and superintending a hundred thousand employees, and being responsible for the public policy of an entire state of eleven million people? What would you pay them? What would you think a reasonable salary for that would be? DePue: In what year are you talking about, today? Thompson: No, in the 1980s. DePue: I don’t know that I’d have a good sense of it, because I’d have to factor in inflation rates and everything else that would— Thompson: The salary was $50,000. DePue: For the governor? Thompson: For the governor. DePue: For the legislators it was $20,000.1 Thompson: Yeah. I’m not saying that governors should be paid the equivalent of private sector CEOs who, having that kind of responsibility, would be paid in the millions. But at some point it becomes out of line, let’s say. The other problem with it is that like other areas of government, people are so afraid of making a 1 The governor’s salary in 1978 was equivalent to $181,500 in 2014; legislators’ pay was equivalent to $72,600 in 2014. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Inflation Calculator, http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl. 359 James Thompson Interview # IST-A-L-2013-054 change that they let it go for years. I’ll give you another example. The people responsible for the toll road don’t want to raise the tolls because people get upset. Well, what’s the result of that? The result of that is that toll road maintenance declines because the revenue is not there to keep the roads in good repair; toll road expansion declines because the revenues aren’t there to finance expansion. And after they go ten or twelve or fifteen years without raising the tolls despite increased inflation over that period of time, they have to raise the tolls high enough to make up, which makes people doubly mad. So there is a fear among policymakers to alienate the public by raising taxes, raising tolls, raising fees, raising salaries. And you have to try and ameliorate that, or you have to be courageous and take a stand and say, “We’ve got to do this. This is crazy.” Most of the time, politicians, including myself, fall down on that job.