Rep. Debbie Riddle, R-Tomball, wants you to know this: Volunteers are unpaid. That’s the point. And she’s had it with House Bill 1462, El Paso Dem Rep. Joe Pickett‘s measure to amend the Government Code to allow state employees up to five hours leave time per month to volunteer with Court Appointed Special Advocates, volunteers who advocate for foster children going through the court system.
Texas law already allows for paid leave time for various activities, including for employees who are, or are training to be, Red Cross disaster service volunteers (up to 10 days paid leave each year).
Maybe Riddle isn’t a fan of encouraging volunteerism – or maybe she just doesn’t like foster kids? That’d just be mean. No, that’s not it. Apparently, Riddle’s real problem has something to do with paying state employees to do … nothing! It seems that Riddle thinks that by allowing state workers to be given time to do volunteer work, that means the state is wasting money, paying them to do nothing – except volunteering, you see, and that’s supposed to be free, she reminded Pickett.
Pickett was understandably irritated, and suggested (sarcastically) that perhaps a better way for the state to save money is to stop taking care of foster kids altogether? And when Riddle suggested that maybe it would violate the charity’s 501(c)(3) status to have taxpayer salaried workers taking paid time to volunteer with foster kids, Pickett said that if there was a problem he’d be sure to “dispatch DPS, arrest [the employees] on site and take them back to their desks.”
To be fair, it wasn’t just Riddle that was frothing over Pickett’s volunteer-time bill – Reps. Wayne Christian, R-Center, and Warren Chisum, R-Pampa, got into the act too, with Chisum suggesting to add volunteer work at a crisis pregnancy center as a permissible use of the leave time. That suggestion was killed on a point of order, and Pickett’s bill did finally pass, 85-56.
This article appears in April 17 • 2009.