South Dakota state lawmakers who use ALEC's corporate escort service voted to increase the Legislature's travel budget by a half-million dollars. We presume they did it so they can take more lavish vacations with ALEC members.
This is telling: They passed the hike in their travel budget on the last day of the regular Legislative session with little discussion.
Sen. Larry Lucas thinks that's disgraceful. He wrote a terrific op-ed in the Sioux Falls Argus Leader, arguing schools, not travel, deserve funding.
Now the executive board of the Legislature, which I serve on, is being asked to amend its out-of-state travel policy so some lawmakers can become frequent fliers. This comes at a time when the state is shifting the cost of education onto property taxpayers and hurting the quality of classrooms from border to border.
Should we spend a half-million more dollars for legislators to travel to national meetings? Is not the current policy of one out-of-state paid trip per year for each legislator adequate? Expanding travel seems contrary to the conservative budgets we pass in South Dakota year after year. A colleague of mine figured that this travel and training money represents an increase of nearly $5,000 per legislator compared to an increase of only $180 per student in K-12 education funding.
Legislators meeting with legislators from other states is not bad. We pay annual dues to the National Council of State Legislatures and the Council of State Governments to allow for this along with other services such as legislative research and state-to-state comparisons. This allows for each of the 50 states to be independent, strong units of government. But expanding legislator travel probably will allow legislators to also use tax dollars to attend meetings of organizations that are funded and backed by partisan advocacy groups such as the ultra-conservative American Legislative Exchange Council. Doing so will make it much easier for private corporations to influence our legislative agendas.He makes a point that's all-too-overlooked these days:
An effective democracy must be free from corporate control and influence, not indebted to wealthy business interests.We hope that boat hasn't sailed already.
