‘Splitting myself in half’: Colorado's citizen-legislature clashes with financial realities

Published by Colorado Politics on Sept. 9, 2023.

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While running for the Colorado House of Representatives, Rep. Stephanie Vigil spent her days and nights knocking on constituents’ doors. Sometimes to ask for their vote. Sometimes to deliver them food. 

On a typical day, Vigil started her mornings with campaign meetings at 8 a.m., before jumping in her car at 10:30 a.m. to make deliveries for apps, such as DoorDash and GrubHub, her sole paying job before taking office. After the lunch rush, Vigil would work on her campaign until around 7 p.m., canvassing, making fundraising calls and responding to emails. Then, on some days, it was back to delivering from dinner hours until she was “too tired to stay out.”

Since prime delivery hours overlapped with prime canvasing hours, Vigil often had to prioritize the election over her paid work. Along the campaign trail, she racked up personal debts and had to make some difficult financial decisions, Vigil said. Doctor’s visits and car payments were put off. Credit card bills received minimum payments, while other, older debts went to collections.

“It was a rather trying time for me,” Vigil, D-Colorado Springs, said. “We really were putting a significant gamble into this. ... You've got to hustle to win.”

Vigil is now one of few working-class members of Colorado’s state legislature.

Nationally, less than 3% of state legislators worked in manual labor, service industry and clerical jobs at the time of their election, while 52% of their constituents hold those working-class jobs, according to data compiled in 2018 by Duke University political science professor Nicholas Carnes.

In theory, “citizen legislatures” like Colorado's are meant to assure its members are ordinary citizens, providing a part-time structure and low pay to keep legislators in the workforce and in touch with their communities. But in practice, the financial burdens of public office often shut out lower-earning individuals from the candidate pool and make it doubly difficult for those who must balance policymaking with other jobs. 

Most Colorado legislators earn $43,977 per year, though senators who entered office before 2023 earn $41,449. That means the highest-paid legislator in Colorado makes less than the lowest-paid county commissioner, sheriff, treasurer, accessor or clerk. For comparison, the median income for Colorado households with one earner was nearly $71,000 in 2022, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.

Former Sen. Chris Holbert estimates he gave up $1 million dollars of earning potential during the 12 years he served in the House and Senate.

“I took a huge pay cut,” Holbert, R-Douglas County, said. “(But) I knew what I was doing. ... I can’t think of any legislator who got rich” from being in the Colorado General Assembly, he said.

People who serve in Congress often get criticized because they – or a family member – got rich while they served, he noted.

“That’s not how your state Capitol works,” Holbert said.

Legislative dreams and financial realities

“While I'm very happy and overjoyed to have the opportunity to serve in the legislature, it's just about the worst financial decision I could make for myself,” said Rep. Mandy Lindsay, D-Aurora. “I'm in my mid-40s, which is kind of prime earning years for wealth building and preparing for the future.”

Lindsay said her legislative salary, combined with her husband’s income, is enough to pay their rent and put food on the table for their four children, but not much else. The family can’t afford to buy a house in Lindsay’s Aurora district, making her one of only a handful of Colorado legislators who rent their home.

Lindsay is among the legislators who don’t have another job outside of the legislature and who, as a result, struggle with finances. Lindsay said when she ran for office, she accepted that she wouldn’t be able to become a homeowner for the foreseeable future.

Financial constraints also seep into Lindsay’s legislative work. Lindsay said she can’t afford to attend most professional conferences offered to state legislators. While legislators can request reimbursements for conferences and travel expenses, that can take months, requiring legislators to pay hundreds of dollars upfront. That’s money Lindsay doesn’t have, she said, joking about having only $20 in her checking account while awaiting direct deposits at the end of the month.

Lindsay’s legislative pay has become a running joke between her and her husband, with the couple quoting “that’s like a dollar an hour” from the movie “Napoleon Dynamite” every time Lindsay comes home in the middle of the night following lengthy debates at the Capitol.

“The number of hours you spend compared to the amount we make, it's kind of laughable," Lindsay said. “Even as I'm saying I am postponing homeownership, I feel stupid. It feels like a bad financial decision that an adult wouldn't make."

The state legislature meets for 120 days out of the year, from January to May, a decision imposed on the Colorado General Assembly just over three decades ago.

This part-time structure is intended to allow legislators to work a second job, but Lindsay and other legislators say the workload and hectic schedule make holding other employment difficult.

Rep. Elizabeth Velasco, D-Glenwood Springs, ran her own interpretation and translation business for over 10 years. But Velasco lost her business when she ran for office last year. Before she was even elected, the time commitment of campaigning made it impossible for Velasco to manage her business’ time-sensitive requests and forced her to refer clients to other agencies.

Now in the interim after her first legislative session, Velasco said she is looking for work in consulting. But even though she’s not in the Capitol voting on legislation every day, Velasco said she still doesn’t have the time to draft a business plan.

Velasco said she’s still working full-time: leading the interim Wildfire Matters Review Committee, sitting on the air quality committee, hosting town hall meetings, drafting legislation for next year, meeting with elected officials, and launching her reelection campaign.

"The job of being a legislator, it definitely doesn't feel like it's a part-time job,” Velasco said. “I want to do a lot. I want to do as much as I can because there's such a big opportunity for change for our communities.”

Velasco said she makes way less money as a legislator than she has in the last decade. Since she lives more than 50 miles from the Capitol in Denver, Velasco gets an extra $237 stipend every day of the 120-day legislative session to cover her living expenses away from her district. But Velasco said even with that added money, she spends the session living out of a basement 20 minutes away from the Capitol — because it’s all she can afford.

And since she’s required to spend four months of the year in Denver, around 160 miles away from her Glenwood Springs home, finding another job to work half of the year between her frequent interim work is proving difficult.

"It feels like I'm starting from zero,” Velasco said. "I have to come up with something different to do.”

During his 16 years as a legislator, former state Sen. Jerry Sonnenberg said he lost more money trying to keep his businesses running than the legislature paid.

While he was in the Capitol during the session, Sonnenberg was forced to use his legislator's salary to hire someone to manage his cattle trucking business, ranch and farm until his sons were old enough to take on that responsibility. 

"Back then, my salary was $30,000 and it would cost me over $20,000 a year to hire my spring work done, such as spraying and planting corn," Sonnenberg, R-Sterling, said. 

When she entered the legislature, Rep. Dafna Michaelson Jenet expected to take a pay cut, but she didn’t realize how substantial it would be. Her nonprofit, the Journey Institute, which provides community building training, lost its biggest client when she took office because Michaelson Jenet was no longer nonpartisan, she said.

That single contract paid more than Michaelson Jenet’s entire legislative salary.

“Each month, it's a struggle to keep the house,” Michaelson Jenet, D-Commerce City, said. “It's tough. We made the decision that we're going to figure it out, but it's tough.”

Michaelson Jenet said even if she hadn’t lost the contract, she couldn’t have possibly given the client the time and attention they needed while being a legislator. Almost seven years into her legislative career, she does “very little” work for her nonprofit because the legislature takes up all her time. She said she works full-time every day — during the session and in the interim.

Now, Michaelson Jenet is moving from the House to the upper chamber, chosen on Aug. 31 to fill a vacant Senate seat after the resignation of Sen. Dominick Moreno. Despite their financial difficulties, Michaelson Jenet said she and her husband have committed to continue scraping by for as long as she is able to serve.

“I want to give the legislature all I can and my constituents all I can because this is a once in a freaking lifetime experience,” Michaelson Jenet said. “If I'm going to do my public service, I'm going to do it all the way.”

Lindsay similarly said she is fully dedicated to her job as a legislator, but lamented how her “love for this job clashes with the financial realities” of her life.

“I want to ask my colleagues: How do you make this work?” Lindsay said. “Does your spouse make a ton of money? I know some people are retired or have pensions or some people are lawyers. ... I just don't have a situation like that. What am I supposed to do?”

‘Being a legislator is a full-time job’

The most common profession among Colorado's 2023-24 class of legislators is attorney, accounting for at least 15 of the 100 lawmakers. Next is retired with 11 legislators, and business owner with 10. Another six legislators run nonprofit organizations and six more run farms and/or ranches, arguably adding to the business owner tally.

Rep. Javier Mabrey, D-Denver, is one of the lawyers overrepresented in the legislature, but he’s not the high-earner one might expect from the title. Mabrey is a nonprofit attorney doing eviction defense work for the Community Economic Defense Project.

“So, I already wasn’t making the big bucks,” said Mabrey, who is among the legislators who hold day jobs in addition to legislating, leading to struggles with overlapping time commitments.

Mabrey continues to work as an attorney during the legislative session, though he doesn’t take on a full caseload. This still leads him to spend whatever evenings, nights and weekends that he’s not in the Capitol working on cases, he said. After the session ends, Mabrey works more than 40 hours per week as an attorney, on top of around 30 hours per week of legislative work, such as meeting with constituents and drafting legislation.

"My schedule is not atypical. I think a lot of legislators work around as much, or at least as much, as me and a lot of them have kids and families,” Mabrey said. "But it is a lot. I don't get a lot of time for myself.”

Mabrey said he makes about as much money as a legislator as he loses from cutting back on his work as an attorney — though he now works way more hours. He said he couldn’t survive on just his legislative salary while helping to support his mother and brother, paying his mortgage and dealing with a six-figure student loan debt.

“If the pay were such that I could afford to only be a legislator, I would love to do that. That's just not where things are in reality,” Mabrey said. “Being a legislator is a full-time job. Even in the off session, there's so much we can do and should do to engage with our communities and stakeholders across the state who are involved in the crafting of legislation that will improve or harm our constituents’ lives.”

When Rep. Lorena Garcia was asked to fill a vacancy in the state House in January, she couldn't afford to quit her day job, either.

Garcia, D-Adams County, runs the Colorado Statewide Parent Coalition. She said she works 70 to 80 hours a week for the nonprofit outside of the session. During the session, she works reduced hours, but there’s “not a chance” she could afford to only work as a legislator.

Garcia’s days during the session typically started at around 5 a.m. to handle daily tasks for her nonprofit and to attend an organizational meeting at 8 a.m. Then she was ready to start her legislative work when the House convened at 9 a.m. Garcia scheduled her nonprofit duties and meetings between her afternoon legislative committee hearings, though she often had to cancel on her nonprofit when debates ran late. And the work only continued whenever she was home: “Weekends didn’t exist,” she said.

“It is difficult,” Garcia said. “And I am incredibly privileged to have such a flexible job. I don't have to clock in at 9 a.m., clock out at 5 p.m., like most other jobs where it would be impossible to balance the two.”

Garcia said she can't financially afford to go to the legislative conferences, receptions and galas she would like to, in particular because she entered office through a vacancy, so she doesn’t have the campaign fundraising money many other legislators have. But the biggest effect is on her schedule and mental load.

"When you have to work another job, it absolutely limits your ability to be as engaged and as participatory as you would like,” Garcia said. “Yes, it’s hard economically, but it's also your obligation to your other job.”

Former Rep. Serena Gonzales-Gutierrez, D-Denver, spent five years in the House balancing her legislative work with directing a collaborative management program in Denver as an independent contractor. She worked both jobs during and out of the legislative session. And on top of that, she raised three young children, the youngest of whom was only two years old when Gonzales-Gutierrez took office.

“I didn’t have the luxury of not working during session. I’m running legislation, I’m doing stakeholder meetings and I'm splitting myself in half doing this other work,” Gonzales-Gutierrez said. “I worked nonstop and then tried to be a parent and be at my kids' activities and be a part of their lives.”

Gonzales-Gutierrez resigned from the state House last month to begin her new job as a member of the Denver City Council, which she was elected to in April. Gonzales-Gutierrez said her primary motivation for changing offices was to serve the public on a local level, but she said the more manageable schedule and ability to focus on only one job “played a big part” in her decision.

After becoming a councilwoman, Gonzales-Gutierrez's government salary more than doubled overnight, from under $44,000 in the legislature to more than $110,000 in the city council.

Thanks to this raise, Gonzales-Gutierrez was able to leave her second job. She said it significantly improved her sense of financial security and stability, but the most substantial change is how she gets to spend her time, such as eating dinner with her family.

“With this work, you sacrifice a lot,” Gonzales-Gutierrez said. “Spending more time with my family, going to my kids' games, taking my daughter to practice. Things that are just normal activities, I wasn't able to be a part of. … It’s an impact on your quality of life.”

As it is now, Gonzales-Gutierrez said the state legislature is simply not working — at least not for people from working families like hers.

“I don't think it's set up for people like me,” she said. “It shouldn't be that you sacrifice everything to be in these places.”

When Sen. Byron Pelton, R-Sterling, went from a Logan County Commissioner to a state senator, his salary fell by nearly 45%. On top of that, his electrician business dropped off because he can no longer take on big projects. Pelton said he had to turn down a contract that would have started in October because it wouldn’t have finished until mid-session. Were it not for his wife’s job, finances would be a lot tougher, he said.

Pelton, like his cousin and fellow state senator Rod Pelton, is also a rancher.

Byron recently moved his herd to his dad’s ranch near Strasburg when his leased pasture was sold. He then sold off half his herd. The price of cattle was too good to turn down, he said.

Rod, too, must change how he manages his herd during the legislative session. This last session, the cattle stayed at Byron's dad’s, so he and Byron could take turns keeping an eye on the heifers while they calved in early spring. He’d be up half the night watching over a heifer in labor and then grab a couple of hours of sleep before heading to the Capitol.

So, why does he serve, with all the adaptations he’s had to make? He pointed to his herd.

“To protect this,” he said, meaning the rural way of life that his family has been part of for four generations.

A citizen legislature?

Not all state legislatures are run like Colorado’s. Each varies drastically from state to state.

When it comes to legislative pay, Colorado is in the middle of the pack. Colorado’s legislative salary of $43,977 is the 19th highest in the nation. New York, California and Pennsylvania all pay state legislators six figures, with New York paying the most at $142,000. But New Mexico doesn’t give its legislators any annual salary, and six other states pay less than $10,000 per year.

While Colorado’s legislature meets for 120 days each year, in nine states, legislatures meet year-round, including Massachusetts, New York and Ohio. Other states meet more infrequently, such as Texas, Nevada and Montana, which only convene every other year, some for only 90 days.

In concept, state legislatures that are part time and low paying are meant to assure that legislators can relate to their constituents, said Seth Masket, professor of political science and the director of the Center on American Politics at the University of Denver.

“The idea is that people shouldn't be politicians professionally, that it's something they should do for a time out of a sense of service and then return to whatever their life was before that,” Masket said. “If someone spends too long working in the legislature, they become out of touch with what the citizens of the state need. By intentionally not paying them enough to live off year-round, that forces them to be more connected with their home community.”

But in practice, this doesn’t usually pan out, Masket said. Instead of assuring that legislators are regular working people, part-time schedules and low pay can make the job too difficult for those who are not wealthy, retired or working abnormal jobs that allow them to take months off at a time.

This helps account for fewer than 3% of state legislators nationally coming from working-class professions, compared to 52% of the U.S. population.

"You end up with a somewhat less representative legislature, one that doesn't necessarily represent the diversity of the state,” Masket said. "Whichever groups of people have more money tend to be better represented. So, you end up with somewhat older, somewhat whiter legislatures as a result.”

As someone who grew up in poverty and has experienced homelessness, Mabrey said the disconnect between most of his fellow legislators and average citizens is painfully evident.

Mabrey’s experiences color his perspective on policy issues, he said, recounting having his power and water shut off as a child, being evicted from his home as a teenager, and working as a janitor, cook and delivery driver as he put himself through law school.

"If you've never faced housing instability, or eviction, or harassment in the workplace, or lived paycheck to paycheck, you're going to approach these issues differently,” Mabrey said. “Are you more likely to approach the issue of fair workweek from the perspective of a restaurant owner, or from the perspective of a dishwasher? Those dynamics absolutely play out in the legislature.” 

Holbert, the former Senate minority leader, believes the citizen legislature still works.

Holbert said people don’t want career politicians in the state house. He noted that the full-time equivalent of the maximum 16 years legislators can serve across the Colorado House and Senate is about 7.2 years. In the private sector, such experience translates to senior level manager position, Holbert said.

“And we make them go away” after that, he said.

Senate Minority Leader Paul Lundeen, R-Monument, said legislators who spend their entire careers working in government “bring a very different value set” to policymaking “than someone who gets up at four in the morning to vaccinate calves and brings that experience into the legislature.”

Lundeen said a professional legislature leads to lawmakers who seek greater professional status and greater expansion of government — because “that’s all they’ve ever known.”

Lundeen, a business owner, said he has to put in extra work to take care of his clients and function as a lawmaker, and to take care of his family and raise his children. He said he sympathizes with lawmakers who are members of the working class.

“An individual who has a shift job and who wants to serve in the General Assembly, that would be very challenging. They’d have to have a very supportive employer,” Lundeen said.

But whether they are sympatric or not, Vigil said she’s struggled to get some of her colleagues to understand what it’s like to have no money, to have to choose which bills will get paid at the end of the month and to know her phone will be shut off so she can pay rent on her apartment.

“I was trying to explain to someone what it means to be poor in America in the 21st century, and they were looking at me like I had three heads or something. ... It just doesn't register to people unless they've lived it,” Vigil said. “We can't fix those systems if rich people keep deciding what's acceptable for the rest of us.”

When asking working-class legislators how the legislature could work better for them, two primary answers arose: A full-time structure and higher pay.

This would allow legislators to focus their energy on public service year-round and provide more time for policy drafting and debates, some argued. Others said the part-time structure should remain to give legislators time to spend in their own communities, working directly on constituent issues.

But raising the pay or the number of session days would be tricky to pull off, Masket said.

"(A full-time legislature) is possible, but I think that's pretty far off in the future. ... We're generally, across the nation, in a somewhat different political environment today, where it's harder to make the argument for more active government," Masket said. “And it's always an unpopular political move for legislators to raise their own pay. It's fairly easy to demonize.”

To get around the raise issue, Masket and a few legislators suggested creating an independent commission to set legislator wages.

But where Colorado thrives in improving legislative representation is party outreach, Masket said, attributing that to the Colorado legislature being more economically diverse than state legislatures nationally.

Vigil, too, said state leaders should actively recruit and mentor people who have experienced poverty to run for office. To start encouraging others, legislators should be vocal and vulnerable about their own experiences, she said.

“I want more poor people in office with me,” Vigil said. “If I could do it, you probably could, too.”