The state legislature may be out of session but according to local media reports Rep. Joe Carr (R-48) has been spending a lot of summer days at the Capitol claiming per diems, a day’s pay for showing up. Rep. Carr was at the top of the list when it came to which Republican requested the most per diems after the session was already over.
It’s gotten so bad that Republican House Speaker Kent Williams issued a letter to all Representatives asking them to follow some basic guidelines to cut per diem requests. You can read the letter here.
Rep. Carr must not have gotten the memo because he kept requesting money all summer when he thought no one would be watching. Rep. Carr didn’t think twice about pushing his own bill in the last session demanding Gov. Bredesen not accept federal stimulus funds for extended jobless benefits for his district’s growing unemployed. Now that Rep. Carr needs a stimulus of his own, he’s off to collect his directly from the tax payers.
We’ll take a closer look at Rep. Carr’s summer per diem requests later, but first, let’s look at how much our county’s delegation is costing us.
What the list of our county delegation’s per diem requests for the entire session factually shows the voters of our county is a record of spending on the part of the Republican delegation. Rep. Donna Rowland (R-34) doesn’t look that bad on the surface, but then she’s got a lot of making up to do for being deemed the most expensive Republican in the entire House for filing resolutions honoring everything from campaign contributors to her new boyfriend.
The list below does not include per diem requests made after the session, which ought to put Rep. Carr over the top.
| Member
(R) Sen. Jim Tracy from Shelbyville |
Mileage
$ 2,039.04 |
Per Diem
$ 18,126.00 |
Total
$ 20,165.04 |
| (R) Rep. Joe Carr from Lascassas | $ 1,425.60 | $ 16,929.00 | $ 18,354.60 |
| (R) Sen. Bill Ketron from Murfreesboro | $ 1,306.42 | $ 15,048.00 | $ 16,354.42 |
| (R) Rep. Donna Rowland from Murfreesboro | $ 831.60 | $ 12,825.00 | $ 13,656.60 |
| (D) Rep. Kent Coleman from Murfreesboro | $ 756.00 | $ 12,825.00 | $ 13,581.00 |
As an independent who lurks on this site and other’s I appreciate whenever we get information about how our legislator’s spend our money. The difference between Rep. Carr and Rep. Coleman seems insignificant to me, about $4,000.00. While I didn’t vote for Carr, the fact that he is a freshman I would expect his per diem to be a higher given that he would have a learning curve. Regardless, I won’t be voting him but it won’t be because of a measly $4,000.00. I want a candidate who supports the right of a woman to have an abortion! It’s my body not yours keep your hands off my womb! I understand that Coleman voted for SJR127 can somebody tell me if this is true? If so I will work agaisnt him too!
Thx
Thanks for the information! I went to the website where all the members of the legislature are listed and found that of the top ten spenders in per diem 7 were tax and spend democrats. I would not have known had you not pointed that out. Thanks for the information. Keep up the good work.
Betsy, by the way Coleman did vote for SJR127!! ROFLMAO…Democrats are soooo stupid.
Tom, Rutherford County voters don’t vote in other counties. All four of our county’s Republicans out spent our county’s Democrat, and those are the only ones this story focusing on.
This is the thing. You got these tea party Republicans who don’t want to pay taxes following a leader who hasn’t paid $80,000 in taxes over ten years. And all they complain about is how the federal government now has a President that’s trying to clean up the mess they made over the last eight years. These are the same people that wanted four more years of Bush and Palin and another generation of health care costs to plunge our families into a life of destitution for the profit of a few of their greedy friends.
And now we got the Republicans taking more money from the tax payers than Kent Coleman? What on earth is going on in this county? It’s exactly like the Republicans the rest of America finally got rid of have flooded to Murfreesboro to spend our tax dollars like George Bush was President again.
This is the thing… If you go to the list of legislators and where they rank on the per diem list, 7 of the top 10 were tax and spend democrats. And now we got Democrats taking more money from the tax payers. Sound familiar? You guys are really grabbing at straws busting Carr’s chops when your own democratic party is at the top of the list. By the way not that I care but Carr was ranked number 40 out of 99 House members.
Where are they from, Todd? And why does our county Republicans rank so high with all those Democrats in spending when the one Democrat we have in Rutherford County is the one spending less of our tax dollars? Isn’t it normally the other way around?
Allan, Todd doesn’t care that the Democrats he’s talking about are from Nashville. He’s perfectly willing to compare his own Rutherford County Republicans to a bunch of Nashville Democrats and I say let them!
Rep. Joe Carr out spent every single Democrat in the House, including the Democrats Todd is talking about. We need more Democrats like our own Kent Coleman and get these tax and spend Republicans out of there like the rest of America did in November.
And the more I think of it the more I think I like Donna Rowland. The more she separates herself from Ketron, Carr and Tracy the more I like her.
I hope that someone will step forward to take on Bill Ketron. One only has to read his financial disclosure to see that he is the number one lap dog for corporate special interests in the Senate.
He accepted enormous amounts from Atmos Energy through their officers and employees while working with Jack Johnson to deregulate them and Piedmont to where they could charge whatever they wanted for natural gas. Follow the money from the PACs to Ketron and trace where it came from and you will find that he is owned by everything from the cable industry to Walmart.
[...] County Democratic Party and the Tennessee Democratic Party are all over this story about the per diem and mileage racket being run by Republican state legislators from one of Nashville’s donut counties. Eighteen thousand bucks in mileage for Jim Tracy? [...]
Very interesting. Where are these figures coming from? Is this info online somewhere?
Its on the Tennessee Legislature’s website and this site put last session totals in a list:
http://www.nashvilleistalking.com/2009/08/rep-jason-mumpower-tops-list-of-house-per-diem-requests/