Taps own money to pay liaison to Hmong community
By Frederic J.Frommer / Associated Press
Sen. Mark Dayton isn’t just foregoing his Senate salary, he’s actually losing money on the gig. The Minnesota Democrat is using his own money to pay the salary of a staffer who can’t be paid with federal funds because she’s not a U.S. citizen.
Dayton is one of only three U.S. senators who supplement their Senate payroll with their own money. All three — Dayton, Herb Kohl, D-Wis., and Ted Kennedy, D-Mass. — are millionaires.
Dayton, a freshman senator, pays Seng Vang, a Laotian citizen, $28,000 from his personal funds. Twenty-one-year-old Hmong American Vang, is the office’s connection to Minnesota’s Asian American community. The state is home to an estimated 60,000 Hmong Americans.
“Once she becomes a U.S. citizen, she will be added to the Senate payroll,” said Dayton spokesman Marc Kimball, adding that Vang has applied for citizenship.
“Because she’s a young, talented person and a tremendous asset to Minnesota’s rapidly growing Asian community, we have made this temporary arrangement, because we didn’t want to lose her and her talent,” Kimball said.
Federal funds can’t be used to pay non-citizens unless they fall into one of several exceptions, which Vang does not meet.
For Dayton, public service has been an expensive proposition. He spent about $12 million of his own money on last year’s Senate race, and is donating his $145,100 salary to ferry Minnesota seniors to Canada for cheaper prescription drugs.
Meanwhile, Kohl pays his executive assistant and scheduler, Arlene Branca, $36,000 of his own money on top of her $104,000 government salary, so she can work on his charitable efforts and personal correspondences. And Kennedy pays legislative director Carey Parker $31,000 of his own money, in addition to Parker’s government salary of $140,000, the maximum allowed under Senate rules.
Gary Ruskin, director of the Congressional Accountability Project, a Washington D.C.-based watchdog group, said he didn’t have a problem with either Dayton’s or Kohl’s arrangement. But he criticized Kennedy for “evading” the staff spending limit.
“When a staffer’s making $140,000 already, they’re overcompensated and that has problems because you bump staffers into an economic class that makes it easy for them to forget the economic travails and indignities of ordinary folks,” said Ruskin.
“And Senator Kennedy ought to be especially sensitive to that, given his work on behalf of increasing the minimum wage. We don’t want our congressional staffers or our members of Congress to exist in such a high-flying lifestyle that they forget about what it is to have to say no to the kids or not take a vacation.” |
