Earlier this year, the commission that sets salaries for California state elected officials raised those salaries. Because the candidate filing fee is tied to the salary of the office, this means the 2014 filing fees will be somewhat higher for state office than they had been in 2012. For example, the fee to run for the legislature rises from $906 to $953. See this story. Filing fees for state legislature are 1% of the salary; filing fees for statewide office are 2% of the salary.
Actually, the meeting at which the California Citizens Compensation Commission approved the raises which caused the filing fees to go up took place on June 19th of this year. The commission is required to approve a resolution setting salaries for elected officials by June 30th, which takes effect on December 1st. The text of the resolution is at “http://www.calhr.ca.gov/cccc/Pages/cccc-resolutions-20130619.aspx”. The reason there was a news story about it today was presumably because it is a slow news day at the capitol, so a Sacramento Bee reporter wrote a story about which legislators turned down the raise.
I believe that the candidate information summaries on the Secretary of State’s website reflected those raises in the filing fees since the summaries were first posted (at least a month ago). Interestingly, these raises in the filing fees weren’t raises, except when compared to the filing fees in special elections to fill legislative vacancies during the current session. The legislative salary had been at the $95,921 level during the time when filings were made for the 2012 elections, but was reduced to $90,526 effective December 2012 by a resolution passed in April 2012 (after legislative candidates already paid their filing fees).
A slight correction to my earlier comment. The CCCC resolution changing pay in 2012 was passed on May 31, 2012, not in April 2012. Their 2011 resolution (which determined the salaries used to set 2012 filing fees) had been passed in April.
Thanks for this additional detail.
What is the connection between the salary for an office, and the filing fee? None -unless they are concerned that people are running for office for the pay.
It would be better to set the petition requirement based on the electorate size (based on gubernatorial vote), and then set the fee based on a reasonable collection rate at minimum wage (for example, 10 minutes per signature at $8/hour).
If the signature count was 0.1% of the gubernatorial vote, 10,095,189, then a statewide candidate would need 10,096 signatures or $13,460.25; or some combination of both.
For other offices (average):
US Representative 191 or $253.97.
State Senator 253 or $336.51
State Representative 127 or $168.25