Wednesday, May 9th, 2007...9:36 pm
That’s Not Pig Latin
A piece in this morning’s Star describes the deprivations that our legislators will have to go through at the capitol now: their per diem is being cut.
I joke about this, but it is the way that many “out-county” legislators are able to pay for a place to live during the session. “Out-county” legislators get $60 a day to pay expenses, and for some reason Maricopa County legislators (whose extra expenses during session are negligible) are paid $35 dollars a day for expenses. (These are in addition to their normal salaries) After the 120th day, these are cut by roughly two-thirds, with an “out-county” legislator’s per diem cut to $20, and per diem to Maricopa County legislators is cut to $10.
Steve Farley made the point in the article that this really doesn’t result in much incentive to cut the session short. Usually, the leadership (and great majority) of both houses is from Maricopa County. Given the fact that they are not as dependent on using the per diem to pay rent on a second apartment, they really don’t feel much of a hit. It could be said that the people making the decisions on when the session actually ends are likely the least likely to need the extra money.
I asked Barrett Marson, who works for the speaker, when this policy of cutting back the per diem started, and if it actually had any effect on the length of sessions. Memories at the capitol place the first per diem payments in the late 1960’s. The policy of cutting them back for long sessions started in 1979. Session length has oscillated since then, with some marathons in the 1990’s. It seems the per diem cut doesn’t have any effect on the length of sessions.
Farley also described his betting pool that he and other legislators participate in for sine die (that’s lege speak for the end of session). He’s not the organizer of the pool, but he’s appointed himself statistician. He’s charted the distribution and says that the data clusters around May 21 (the article was in error on the date), although he has picked June 6th. I asked him if he’s computed mean and standard deviations, he said no, because someone picked December 31st. Come on Steve, everyone knows you do mean and standard deviations precisely to exclude outliers such as that. Geez.
Speaking of folks trying to outgeek other folks, I’m shocked that Daniel Scarpinato, a former Catholic school student, didn’t go into more of an explanation of the terms per diem and sine die. Both are from Latin, and most of us know that the term per diem means “per day,” meaning money issued per day of work to cover expenses. Sine die translates as “without day,” meaning the session has been declared over and there is no date to return. Interestingly, die and diem are both different forms of the noun dies, with die being the ablative case (since it follows the preposition sine) and diem being the accusative case, which in Latin can be used either as a direct object or to indicate a length of time. Aren’t inflected languages fun?
NB - “Arizona Bill” character designed by Bob Richards.
Leave a Reply