By Bill Mahoney
ALBANY — Under Albany’s rules governing lawmakers’ outside income,
the most significant factor determining how much an elected official
earns is the color of his or her skin.
In the system of legislative salaries that's currently being debated
by the state's leaders, lawmakers haven’t had a pay raise since 1998 but
are allowed to earn unlimited amounts of outside income. There are
significant differences in outside income among legislators of different
demographic groups: White legislators earn an average of $35,273 per
year from outside jobs, compared to $2,733 for African American
lawmakers and $11,333 for Latinos.
When all sorts of household income are included, white lawmakers and
their spouses brought in an average of $274,007 in 2015, double the
$139,270 earned by their African-American colleagues and the $133,998
brought in by their Latino counterparts. And the differences are even
sharper when totals are adjusted for the cost of living in members’
districts, according to a POLITICO New York analysis of data maintained
by the Joint Commission on Public Ethics, the state comptroller’s
office, the Empire Center and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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