Your Tax Dollars At Work

In exciting news about lawmakers you don’t know about, Democratic Bucks Co. State Rep. Chris King will return a $5,000 bonus.

Why should you care about this? Oh, there’s no reason for that. But it’s kind of funny, since King was able to unseat Rep. Matt Wright partially by hammering him with the pay raise all election. (Wright didn’t do himself any favors by writing a guest column defending the raise.)

King got the bonus for last year because of good work he’s done (or something). It was much higher than his 2005 bonus, though:

King received a $565 bonus in 2005, far less than that of last year. He said he had changed positions from a policy committee analyst, where he worked with a staff of seven, to a three-person staff under LaGrotta, where he handled both tourism committee business and constituent services. The bonus wasn’t for working longer hours, he said.

“My job responsibilities had increased a tremendous amount,” King said. “We accrue comp time if there are longer hours. I was doing more work in terms of dealing directly with constituents and working on particular bills.”

One bill he researched dealt with a violence rating system for video games, he said.

ESRB.org. Now somebody give me five thousand bucks.

King sending bonus back [Bucks County Courier Times]