EDITORIAL: A brief history of government employee pay increases

If government employees received a pay increase, yet the governor insists salaries haven’t gone up in years, do taxpayers get a refund?

In his State of the State speech, Gov. Steve Sisolak proposed giving state workers a 3 percent pay hike. In promoting his plan, Gov. Sisolak said Tuesday on KNPR’s State of Nevada that Nevada employees “have gone without a raise for a significant amount of time.”

That sounds shocking. It’s also false.

In 2015, the Legislature increased employee pay by eliminating mandatory furlough days. Lawmakers had implemented furloughs to save money during the Great Recession. They also passed a 3 percent pay increase for state workers. Nevada employees in 2015 also received a step increase, unless they were at the top of the pay scale.

But wait. There’s more.

In 2017, then-Gov. Brian Sandoval signed a bill giving state workers 3 percent pay hikes per year. Gov. Sisolak, in contrast, is proposing a single 3 percent increase. Maybe Gov. Sisolak is trying to save a few bucks before he signs a budget-busting measure allowing collective bargaining for Nevada government employees.

Gov. Sisolak’s rhetoric about teacher pay is just as inaccurate. That teachers “have not gotten a raise through the state in a decade or more,” he told KNPR, “ is just unconscionable to me.” What’s unconscionable is the governor deliberately misleading the public.

Education funding is a bit complex because Nevada doesn’t directly fund teacher salaries. The state sends restricted and unrestricted funds to individual districts. The restricted money must go toward specific programs. The unrestricted dollars come from Nevada’s basic per-pupil support and pay for operating expenses, the largest of which is employee salaries.

Over the past 10 years, Nevada has increased guaranteed funding for basic support by $670 million.

Given Nevada’s collective bargaining laws, school districts have had little choice but to use these funds to increase pay. In 2016 — just three years ago — the Clark County School District approved a new teacher contract costing $136 million. The pay hike was so massive that then-Superintendent Pat Skorkowsky said the district would have to use “cuts” to pay for it. Just last year, district teachers won in arbitration and received yet another raise.

In reality, public-sector pay hikes in Nevada have routinely outstripped raises in the private sector, where most workers aren’t guaranteed annual step increases.

Whether state workers deserve more money is a matter of legitimate debate. But let’s not imply that the average state employee’s paycheck today is the same as it was five years ago. It isn’t.

Taxpayers should draw their own conclusions. Go to TransparentNevada.com and see what government employees actually earn. That will make it obvious why Gov. Sisolak has opted to shade his case with demonstrably false claims instead of real numbers.