If we value the office of governor, and we must, we have no choice but to finally correct the salary for the governor of Maine by bringing it in line with our counterparts.

As we’re reporting Sunday, governor pay in our state is the lowest in the U.S. by a very wide margin – $22,700, to be precise. The annual salary of $70,000 has not been raised since 1987. The top 10 salaries paid to Maine state workers last year ranged from $200,000 to $321,000.

It’s easy to make light of this reality; a lot of the commentary about governor pay in recent years has been colorful, sometimes even pretty funny.

Veteran Maine political columnist Al Diamon joked in 2015 that the last time the salary of the “guv” was raised, it was because former Gov. Joseph Brennan had been forced to moonlight as a ballboy for the New England Patriots (“unseemly”).

In 2017, then-Gov. Paul LePage said he felt like “a priest or a nun” on account of the pay. When his wife, Ann, took a waitressing job in Boothbay Harbor the summer prior, it was widely hailed as “supplementing” their income.

In 2020, a state commission got together and declared the pay “embarrassingly low.” 

Amusement or bemusement aside, the rate of pay is simply too low for the qualifications needed for the job, for the work the job requires. The state’s chief executive shouldn’t have to take a pay cut for what is a 24/7/365 job, one demanding many sacrifices.

Opponents of an increase in the salary gesture at little evidence of the need to raise it. What evidence are they looking for?  For the highest office in the state to be left vacant? That hasn’t and won’t happen.

If the position were unpaid, it would still hold interest for many – only the people who could pursue it would have to be wealthy. The catch is that familiar, qualified, senior candidates often are. That catch also applies to the $70,000 rate, which isn’t competitive enough for lots of accomplished working professionals, particularly those who are younger, in the process of raising families or have no other financial support available to them.

It’s true that state governors don’t always take the job for the pay; they take it for the public service mission, or for the prestige or for myriad other personal, professional and political motivations. A salary set at the appropriate level would give a whole new group of people the opportunity to act on these motivations.

The suggestion that keeping a governor’s pay low allows that governor to better relate to the average Mainer is a wishful idea. There’s nothing average about the life of a governor, and, for the reasons mentioned above, the day-to-day financial reality of somebody who decides to take the job at the current rate of pay is likely distorted by the availability of other means, the presence of which, all but a prerequisite, is not exactly equalizing.

And so the pay must be raised. Fortunately, a new bill gives us a chance to do just that – lifting it to $125,000 for Mills’ successor.

For the very same reasons, we should address the state of legislator pay, which is also in the tank at an average of $13,208 per session (and also the subject of a number of bills circulating in Augusta). The prospect of increasing legislator pay should not be approached with trepidation nor a sense of defeat; the voting public should well understand the benefits that a raise could bring to the makeup of the Legislature. The opportunity to lift barriers facing working-class candidates shouldn’t be belittled by the stony charge of “politicians giving themselves a raise.”

Gubernatorial pride in personal thriftiness is its own matter, and the good news for anybody hellbent on it is that it can still be enjoyed. In the event Maine’s next governor feels discomfited by a salary that sits closer to the mid-point of the national rankings – or they feel their electorate is discomfited by it – that governor is free to give that salary right back to the state.

Putting such an increase in statute can lead to grumbling about the need to revisit the pay on the same statutory basis. To that we say: So what? If Maine’s alarming track record is anything to go by, we won’t revisit the salary again until 2059.