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Budget panel kills review of judicial salaries, extra pay for chief justice

Budget panel kills review of judicial salaries, extra pay for chief justice

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A state budget panel has repealed a statute that makes the Supreme Court Chief Justice’s pay different from the salaries of associate justices and has struck down a proposal to create a commission to review judicial salaries.

The motion proposed by state Rep. Dean Knudson, R-Hudson, passed along party lines on a 12-4 vote.

“I think the Judicial Compensation Commission is not needed,” Knudson said. “Current law works fine. I think the salaries can be adjusted under the current system.”

He said that turnover rates provided by the state’s nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau show that there is little evidence that judges are leaving because of inadequate compensation. Rather, he said, he has seen intense competition for judicial appointments.

“There is no doubt,” he said, “that the typical attorney who is highly qualified to be a judge will accept compensation that is less than what they would receive in the private sector.”

Sometimes lower pay is just a fact of working in the public sector, Knudson said.

To keep judicial salaries attractive, the Wisconsin Supreme Court had requested the creation of a Judicial Compensation Commission. The commission’s main goal would be to examine judicial compensation in order to find away to bring “well-qualified lawyers to the bench,” Shirley Abrahamson, one of seven members of the state’s Supreme Court, said at a budget hearing on March 2.

The Supreme Court, in its 2011-2013 budget request, had asked for the creation of the Judicial Compensation Commission, a seven-member body that would review judicial salaries every two years. The members would have been appointed by the governor, the Senate President, the Assembly Speaker, the deans of the University of Wisconsin and Marquette University Law Schools, and the president of the State Bar.

Judicial salaries would have been set according to whichever was higher: the commission’s recommendations or the general wage increases given to all state employees.

Each member would have served for four years, and the commission would have chosen a chairperson. The members of the commission would not have been compensated but “reimbursed for reasonable expenses,” according to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau. The Director of State Courts, for which there has been a vacancy since 2014, would have provided staffing and support services to the commission.

However, the governor’s 2011-2013 biennial budget bill did not include the court’s request. The Legislature then added a provision to the proposed budget calling for the creation of a Judicial Compensation Commission but with some differences from the court’s original version. The governor later vetoed that provision.

The court’s 2015-2017 request, instead of including the money needed to follow through on the Supreme Court’s recommendations, would have required judicial salaries in the 2015-17 state compensation plan to be set at a level comparable those paid in surrounding Midwestern states.

According to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau, Wisconsin Supreme Court justices earn $147,403 a year, whereas as their counterparts in Iowa, Michigan and Minnesota make $175,132 on average. If all the salaries in Wisconsin were increased to match the average salary in surrounding states, an additional $3.1 million would be needed.

In his budget, Gov. Scott Walker modified the court’s 2015-17 request, eliminating the need for the salaries to be set at a level comparable to the average judicial salaries in neighboring states, proposing that judicial salaries be determined by recommendations in the commission’s report, making the commission’s membership appointed by the Supreme Court and removing the provision making the chief justice’s pay different from that of associate justices.

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