House and Senate negotiators publicly opened talks Monday on a final budget for the upcoming year, and one of the issues involves a question left over from the 2015 session.
Should the state’s top judges earn far less than some of their lower-court counterparts?
The issue was debated heavily last year, when lawmakers, who have given tiny raises to 200,000 state employees and teachers, agreed to up the pay of many Superior Court judges by 10 percent. In some cases, Superior Court judges in places such as Cobb County, where regular salary supplements have been approved over the years, earn in the neighborhood of $200,000 a year. That's among the highest in the nation.
By contrast, Supreme Court and Appeals Court justices — who don't receive locally approved pay supplements — received 5 percent raises last session. That boosted their pay to $175,600 and $174,500, respectively, well under what many Superior Court judges earn.
So this year, when the House approved its version of the budget for fiscal 2017, which begins July 1, it included a 3 percent raise for Supreme Court and Appeals Court justices, the same raises offered to state employees and teachers.
That would bring Supreme Court justices up to about $180,000, still well below the pay of Superior Court judges in some judicial districts.
The Senate cut those raises from its version of the budget.
Sen. Charlie Bethel, R-Dalton, a lawyer who worked on the judicial budget for the Senate Appropriations Committee, said, "Ultimately, where we came down was last year we did give them a substantial raise."
In addition, Bethel said, the pay raise bill last year included the creation of a commission to study judicial pay, a panel that got a late start last fall. Bethel said senators want to see the group study the issue and provide a recommendation before giving more pay raises.
The raise issue will be one of dozens that budget negotiators will have to work out before approving a final $23.7 billion spending plan before lawmakers quit for the year next week.
However, last year’s big judicial pay raises have had one legislative side effect: Lawmakers aren’t filing bills this year providing local salary supplement increases for Superior Court judges, as lawyer-legislators have frequently done in the past.
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