| 122nd MAINE LEGISLATURE | |||||||||
| LD 493 | LR 1266(02) | ||||||||
| An Act To Require That All Public School Employees Be Paid a Livable Wage Rate | |||||||||
| Fiscal Note for Bill as Amended by Committee Amendment " " | |||||||||
| Committee: Labor | |||||||||
| Fiscal Note Required: Yes | |||||||||
| Fiscal Note | |||||||||
| Projections | Projections | ||||||||
| 2005-06 | 2006-07 | 2007-08 | 2008-09 | ||||||
| Net Cost (Savings) | |||||||||
| General Fund | $8,927,170 | $12,105,243 | $12,335,242 | $12,594,283 | |||||
| Appropriations/Allocations | |||||||||
| General Fund | $8,927,170 | $12,105,243 | $12,335,242 | $12,594,283 | |||||
| Fiscal Detail and Notes | |||||||||
| This bill includes General Fund appropriations of $8,927,170 in fiscal year 2005-06 and $12,105,243 in fiscal year to the Department of Education for the costs associated with the State fully funding the additional costs of raising school employees' rates of pay to the liveable wage beginning in fiscal year 2005-06. Because projections for the Consumer Price Index - All Urban Consumers all items index for the Northeast Region is not available, this fiscal estimate utilized growth projections of the CPI-U for the United States. | |||||||||
| Because no information was available from the Department of Education to calculate the fiscal impact of this legislation, the Office of Fiscal and Program Review relied on estimates provided by the Maine Education Association (MEA) to determine the fiscal year 2005-06 cost. MEA utilized a database of public school employees employed during the 2004-2005 school year, that it had received from the Department of Education for use in a different study, that contained information on 39,035 school employees in Maine including annual earnings, number of hours worked per day and number of days worked per year. MEA identified approximately 6,161 school personnel whose hourly rate (calculated by dividing annual earnings by annual hours worked) was determined to be below the liveable wage rate of $11.41 per hour for the 2004-2005 school year. For each of those 6,161 employees, MEA calculated the difference between the actual wage rate paid the the employee and the liveable wage rate and then multiplied the difference by the number of annual hours worked by that employee. | |||||||||
| From this analysis, the total cost of this measure was determined to be $11,646,667 had this legislation been in effect for the 2004-2005 school year. Since this legislation is not an emergency, the effective date is assumed to be October 1, 2005. | |||||||||