Web Site Offers Congressional Salaries, with Caution
LegiStorm
Cape Cod Times
Paul Crocetti
Boston University Washington News Service
October 11, 2006
WASHINGTON, Oct. 11–A new Web site is making information on the salaries of the 24,000 staff members who work for Congress easily accessible to the public, but not without words of caution from the site’s founder.
The information has always been available to the public but the appearance of LegiStorm (legistorm.com) in mid-September marks the first time it is available on a single Web site, according to founder Jock Friedly. It has already generated significant interest; in fact, the site crashed because of heavy traffic in its first week.
Users of the site can search for information about staff salaries alphabetically by the staff person’s name or by the congressman, senator or committee for whom they work. They also can search by state delegation.
Several Massachusetts congressional aides said they hadn’t looked at the site, but at least one expressed concern over the way the data is presented.
For House aides, including those for U.S. Rep. William Delahunt (D-Mass.), salaries are reported every three months for the previous quarter (for Senate aides, every six months for the previous half-year).
“In the past, some offices calculated an annual salary based on quarters,” said Mark Forest, Delahunt’s chief of staff. “That’s not necessarily an accurate way to calculate.”
Forest, for example, made almost $37,000 for the three-month period that ended on March 31 (later information has not yet been posted). However, he said an accurate picture of annual salaries cannot always be determined by just one quarter.
Delahunt’s former chief of staff, Steven Clark Schwadron, earned more than $25,000 over the course of two days in early 2006, when he left his job in Delahunt’s office.
“That was unpaid leave, vacation and sick time that he’s accumulated over time according to House rules,” Forest said. “That’s not reflected in there.”
Friedly said more warnings will be included on the Web site on how the salary information is reported.
“It’s certainly important to take it with a little grain of salt, what the actual information means,” said Friedly, who became interested in these numbers while working as a reporter at The Hill, a Washington newspaper that covers Congress. “As with any official records, you should interpret the data with some amount of caution. It would be nice if we had the contract, the salary offer, but these are the best records out there.”
Melissa Wagoner, the press secretary for Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), said she hasn’t looked at the site much, and it hasn’t been heavily discussed in the office.
“The people on Capitol Hill don’t work for money,” she said. “I work for Sen. Kennedy because I believe in what he stands for.”
Brigid O’Rourke, the state press secretary for Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), said she read about the Web site in The Washington Post.
“I haven’t studied it or anything, but I know about it,” she said.
Forest said he hadn’t heard of it before.
“Some things jump out as possibly incorrect right away,” Forest said. “I’m not sure they have the correct titles.”
The data, however, came from the reports filed with the clerk of the House and the secretary of the Senate, LegiStorm says. And when The Times compared the official written reports on salaries in Delahunt’s, Kennedy’s and Kerry’s offices with the data on the Web site, the site was incorrect only by a matter of days on a few periods of work.
Similarly, the short job titles LegiStorm gives for each worker were copied directly from the House and Senate reports.
“What you don’t know is if the nature of the job descriptions is the same,” Forest said. “With several positions on here, they’re doing the job of two or three people.”
Forest said he is Delahunt’s district director as well as his chief of staff, and the LegiStorm site lists his salaries for each position separately.
“Job titles are not perfectly reflective of the titles they have internally in the office,” Friedly said. “There’s nothing we can do about it. Its official House and Senate records. There are 20,000 people working at any one time. It would be unrealistic to go into any detail.”
In Kennedy’s office, for example, one special assistant made nearly $15,000 over a six-month period, another made a little more than $17,000, a third received just over $22,000 and a fourth collected nearly $80,000 in the same period.
Members of Congress make $165,200 annually (more for those in the leadership). The cap on a congressional staff salary is about $162,000.
“On the one hand, it’s certainly interesting and it piques people’s curiosity, but it doesn’t give you the whole picture,” Forest said.
Although Friedly said he’s heard from congressional aides who are anxious about their salaries being posted online, the response has not been all negative.
“I’ve heard some positive things as well, that the site makes the Hill a more open kind of place,” Friedly said. “The staffers have the power to negotiate [for pay] that they didn’t have before. It should be interesting to see how the House and Senate pay in the future. There will be more awareness to what will be paid. I don’t think we’ve seen the last as to the reactions to the Web site.”
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