A couple of Saturdays ago, I was interested and a little startled to hear WPRO‘s John Loughlin state that, operating budget-wise, Rhode Island has one of the most expensive state legislatures.

Upon reflection, as almost everything else about Rhode Island government is expensive, it was easy to believe.  Demonstrating (or disproving) it with figures, however, proved a little tougher.  After an exasperating hour of unfruitful research, I turned in desperation to the NCLS (National Conference of State Legislatures).

NCLS’ Brian Webert not only called me back the same day but explained the research difficulty I had encountered:  rankings of the operating costs of state legislatures were not widely available because the basis of the figure reported by each state varies.  Certain operating expenses were included by some states but not by others.  Organizations that would normally have compiled and put forward  a ranking of legislature operating cost refrained from doing so due to this variation in reported operating costs.

The NCLS has compiled such a ranking; however, Brian wanted me to emphasize that it was compiled from data was pulled from the US Census.  He kindly e-mailed me a PDF of this ranking, available here.

The US Census data indicates that Rhode Island has the second most expensive state legislature in the country.

Further, as the title of this post indicates, the RI General Assembly seems not to be content with second place, as reflected below in the inexorable rise of their annual budget.

Neither the size of the General Assembly nor the population of Rhode Island has increased in the last, say, ten years.  Simultaneously, certain areas of government services have suffered either from chronic underfunding – roads and bridges, for example – or had to endure a reduction of their budget at the hands of the G.A. – services to the disabled shamefully falling into this category.  (What’s your “favorite” underfunded gov’t service?)  No, the baseline budgets of the G.A. and, say, the DOT are not quite comparable.  But it’s the principle.  Government services suffer while the spending budget that our elected officials give themselves to play with is high and rising annually?  Not to mention a recession, during which – crazy concept – almost everyone had to cut back.

The General Assembly’s spending on itself rose from $34,900,000 in 2007 to $41,900,000 in 2013.  How is this justified?  In light of all of the above, shouldn’t the legislature at a minimum be level funding itself?

Budget for the RI General Assembly

2007 Revised (from the Governor’s FY 2008 Budget, Page 65 of this PDF):   $34,900,000

2008 Revised (from the Governor’s FY 2009 Budget, Page 17 of this PDF): $37,600,000

2009 Revised (from the Governor’s FY 2010 Budget, Page 16 of this PDF :  $35,000,000

2010 Revised (from the Governor’s FY 2011 Budget, Page 15 of this PDF) :  $35,700,000

2011 Revised (from the Governor’s FY 2012 Budget, Page 13 of this PDF):  $38,500,000

2012 Revised (from the Governor’s FY 2013 Budget, Page 3 of this PDF ): $41,671,427

2013 Revised (from the Governor’s FY 2014 Budget, Page 15 of this PDF ):  $41,900,00