AG’s pay rises
to Cabinet’s highestState executives get their first
salary hike in nearly a decade
State Attorney General Mark Bennett will become the highest-paid Cabinet member tomorrow when state executives get their first pay raises since 1995.
Bennett's annual salary will jump 23 percent to $105,000 from $85,302. The salaries for the other state department heads will also increase tomorrow but by smaller amounts. At the new rate, Bennett will be paid more than his boss, Gov. Linda Lingle, who does not get a raise until 2006.
"In Cabinet we joked around about it more than anything else," Lingle said, "We all told the attorney general he owes us all a dinner once a month since now he's the highest paid person, which he agreed to."
Lingle's $94,780 annual salary is scheduled to go up 18 percent to $112,000 in 2006.Also rising in 2006 are the salaries of the lieutenant governor and the governor's chief of staff, who each will be paid $100,000 from their current annual salaries of $90,041, an 11 percent increase.
Bennett said his new salary is still a fraction of what he earned as a private attorney prior to joining the Lingle administration.
Under a new tiered salary schedule recommended by the Executive Salary Commission in February, the state attorney general and his deputy are in the highest salary level.
The directors and deputies for the departments of Accounting and General Services, Budget and Finance, Commerce and Consumer Affairs, Health, Taxation and Transportation are in the second-highest level.
The departments of Business, Economic Development and Tourism; Human Services; Labor and Industrial Relations; and Land and Natural Resources will have the third-highest salaries.
And the directors and deputies for the departments of Agriculture, Hawaiian Home Lands, Human Resources Development and Public Safety are in the lowest salary level.
"There were one or two department heads that were concerned about how it would affect people's morale to have these different tiering," Lingle said.
But Lingle does not believe the different salaries will affect recruiting and retaining people interested in becoming state department directors or deputies.
In addition to the initial pay raises, the commission recommended the salaries increase 2 percent a year for the next seven years. The final pay hike for department heads and their deputies is in 2011. For the governor, lieutenant governor and the chief of staff, their final pay raise is in 2013.
State lawmakers allowed the recommendations to go into effect when they failed to reject them by the end of this year's legislative session.
