The incoming Republican majority at the North Carolina General Assembly will have to decide how best to deploy the legislature’s professional staff to achieve its policy goals.

Since Democrats held continuous control of the General Assembly for more than a century — with the exception of four years in the 1990s when the parties shared power — and the majority party controls the size, organization, and composition of legislative staffing, the GOP has not held this much sway over staffing in modern history.

While other states use a variety of models to handle administrative and policy-making duties, Republican legislative leaders contacted by Carolina Journal — including the party’s nominees for speaker of the House, Thom Tillis of Mecklenburg County, House majority leader, Paul Stam of Wake County, and Senate president pro tem, Phil Berger of Rockingham County — declined to respond to questions asking what changes, if any, they plan for the 2011 session.

(Tillis told The News & Observer that he expects few members of the policymaking staff would be replaced by the incoming leadership.)

Even so, Republicans could modify significantly the structure and personnel of the legislative staff, or leave the existing system in place.

Shared nonpartisan staff

Each of the 120 members of the N.C. House and 50 members of the N.C. Senate has a legislative assistant. The House speaker and Senate president pro tem each currently hires roughly 10 more staff members. The minority leader of each chamber traditionally is allowed one additional staff person.

The Legislative Services Commission, comprising seven members from each chamber, determines the composition of the staff. Currently, the Senate and House share permanent, nonpartisan central office staff. These staff members help lawmakers with administrative tasks and handle policy-making duties for standing committees and subcommittees.

The Legislative Services Office, which oversees staff policy and administration, has seven divisions that provide a variety of legislative services, including: bill drafting; legal assistance; fiscal analysis; general and library research; administration of the legislature’s budget, clerical, and information systems; printing; food service; building maintenance; information for constituent inquiries; and security.

A spokesman for Legislative Services Officer George Hall told CJ these seven divisions have a total of 242 staff: 86 in administration, 47 in research, 40 in fiscal research, 39 in information services, 17 in bill drafting, nine in program evaluation, and four in personnel.

Permanent staff members serve at the pleasure of the House speaker and the Senate president pro tem and are not protected by civil service laws.

“North Carolina is pretty lean with respect to other states regarding staffing,” said Tim Storey, a legislative analyst for the nonpartisan National Conference of State Legislatures.

Other models

Other legislative bodies deploy different models. For instance, the U.S. Congress has permanent partisan majority and minority staff in the House and the Senate. They assist leaders and members of their respective partues in developing a legislative agenda, researching and analyzing issues, briefing members of legislation, advising members, and providing other services. The majority party typically gives itself a larger share of the staffing budget for both members’ offices and committees.

“Congress has more staff than any other legislative body in the world,” Storey said, “with about 28,000 staff, which is twice that of any other nation.”

In 2006, NCSL developed detailed profiles of legislative staff services for every U.S. state, commonwealth, and territory. “States have mostly citizen legislatures,” Storey said, meaning lawmakers have full-time occupations aside from their legislative duties and the legislative session lasts only a portion of the year.

Some states follow a model similar to the U.S. Congress, though not nearly as decentralized or with as many committees, subcommittees, and supporting agencies.

New York is structured more like Congress than perhaps any other state. New York’s staff — which The New York Post reports had more than 2,700 positions in 2009, by far the most in the nation — is structured by chamber and party line and has few joint, nonpartisan entities. By contrast, California, with twice the population of New York, employs 650 fewer staffers.

Arizona and New Jersey have full-time partisan majority and minority staff for the Senate and House leadership and caucuses but share other nonpartisan central office staff for policy and fiscal research, bill drafting, and some other services. Minnesota also has shared staff for research, information, and administration, but assigns a substantial number of staff to partisan legislative research activities.

There’s no perfect or absolute model. “The most common model appears to be centralized, nonpartisan or chamber and caucus decentralized with centralized fiscal research, administration, and research,” said Storey, “but it’s common for new leaders to analyze the legislative staffing structure, even if they end up not making a lot of changes.”

Nearby examples

North Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee have citizen legislatures, with centralized, nonpartisan staff. Eight years ago, Georgia’s legislature shifted to a Republican majority in both chambers for the first time in 120 years.

“We do have one position that stays with each party,” said GOP state Sen. Don Balfour, and “the Senate and House have separate research staff but they’re not divided by party. I think there’s always a question when one party has been in power for a very long time period about whether staff [is] truly nonpartisan. When it comes to research, staff should conduct research with the same zeal and thoroughness for a member, based on what that member needs, and not pay attention to party ideology.”

In Tennessee, for the first time since Reconstruction, Republicans won a slim majority in the Senate in 2004. Four years later, Republicans won the House for the first time and widened their majority in the Senate. In 2010, Republicans expanded their majorities in both chambers and elected a Republican governor, making modern history with Republicans leading both the executive and legislative branches.

Outgoing House Majority Leader Jason Mumpower, a Republican, told CJ that before 2008, Democrats changed the rules so that each Democratic lawmaker had an administrative assistant, while two or three Republicans were forced to share a single assistant.

“That arrangement made it harder for constituents to contact Republican lawmakers,” said Mumpower, who did not seek re-election in 2010. “The biggest change we made after our wins in 2008 was to bring back a 1:1 ratio. I expect the Tennessee General Assembly will see more significant staff changes [in 2011] because Republicans will now have a much bigger majority.”

Karen McMahan is a contributor to Carolina Journal.