North Carolina state legislators are paid $13,951. Is that too low?

For years, legislative pay has been the issue no state lawmaker wants to touch.

No one, it seems, is willing to risk a campaign attack that says they voted to pay themselves more. But Sen. Jim Burgin, R-Harnett, thinks he has a solution to the optics problem: Create a commission of people who don’t serve in elected office to make recommendations about lawmaker pay.

Burgin’s Senate Bill 534 would create a Legislative Reform Commission, with four members appointed by each chamber, to look at legislative pay, per diems for food and lodging during session and mileage rates. But no one on the commission could be an elected official.

“I think it’s time to look at it,” Burgin said. “Nothing has been changed on this since back in the ‘80s. … The best way to handle it is to have an independent group do it.”

Burgin’s bill is one of several that lawmakers have filed this year related to their own work, and while so far none have gotten a hearing, bill sponsors are hopeful they can spark a discussion on how to make the General Assembly function better in the future.

Other proposals address transparency issues and seek improvements that make it easier to follow the legislative process.

Salaries, term limits

Burgin says most of the constituents he talks to think state lawmakers have six-figure salaries like members of Congress. Instead, they make $13,951 plus a $104 daily per diem payment during session — ranking among the lowest in the country despite increasing session lengths that take them away from their districts and day jobs.

Burgin said that limits service to retirees, attorneys and business owners like himself who have reliable workers to keep things running smoothly in their absence.

The commission would be tasked with reviewing other states’ legislator compensation and making a recommendation, which Burgin said might involve raising pay to match the starting teacher salary of $35,000. He’d like to see voters weigh in on any proposals.

“At least it would have brought (the low pay) to their attention,” he said.

Asked about Burgin’s bill, Senate leader Phil Berger said it’s worth a look.

“I think the question is going to be whether it comes forward with a recommendation that would garner support from a majority of members,” he said. “We have seen in the past that it’s very difficult to see support for measures that raise the compensation for legislators.”

Burgin also wants the commission to consider term lengths and limits. While he says he’s supportive of the current House and Senate leadership (some of whom have been in office for about two decades), he thinks 16 years might be a good cap to address voter support for term limits. He’d also like to look at four-year terms.

“It’s really about protecting the voters,” he said. “We are bombarding these people and spending a lot of money to have an election every two years.”

Transparency reforms proposed

Pay and term lengths aren’t the only things some legislators want to change. As they have in years past, Democrats have filed a number of bills to inject more transparency into the legislative process.

But none have gotten a hearing so far. Reps. John Ager, D-Buncombe, and Carolyn Logan, D-Mecklenburg, proposed a laundry list of reforms in House Bill 678, titled the “Legislative Transparency Act.” The goal of that legislation is to make it easier for the public to understand and follow the process.

HB 678 says bills couldn’t get a House floor vote unless they’ve been on the calendar for at least 24 hours. Bills getting a “proposed committee substitute” — essentially a new version that’s sometimes completely unrelated to the original bill topic — would also have to be public at least 24 hours before the vote.

“My motivation is to let the voting public and the interest groups out there have a better shot at being able to track these bills,” said Ager, adding that he wants to “give the public the chance to follow them and not make them feel like they’re being tricked or duped by last-minute changes.”

Increasingly this year, the House has opted to add bills approved in the Rules Committee to the floor calendar minutes before a vote.

House Speaker Tim Moore often provides a heads-up about such moves during his session remarks, but someone looking only at the published calendar would likely miss the bill. Proposed committee substitutes are a similar story: Until they’re voted on, the legislature’s website only shows the previous version of a bill.

So a bill could be replaced by something unrelated, and it’s only published online after it’s received its first committee vote. Ager suspects the current approach is based on speed.

“Running the General Assembly is not a piece of cake, and some of these changes in this bill would slow things down,” he said, adding that “inertia” is preventing discussion of improvements.

But progress has been made recently on another suggestion in HB 678. The bill calls for all sessions and committee meetings to have video streamed online. That’s something that’s now offered in nearly every meeting with the exception of Senate floor sessions and a few little-used committee rooms.

But HB 678 suggests those videos should also be archived. For now, each video disappears as soon as the meeting ends, and getting a recording of a committee meeting still requires a trip to the Legislative Library.

For more North Carolina government and politics news, listen to the Under the Dome politics podcast from The News & Observer and the NC Insider. You can find it at link.chtbl.com/underthedomenc or wherever you get your podcasts.