Inauguration week places the spotlight on Maine’s new governor. The Augusta Civic Center ceremony that took place Wednesday creates one measure of the man who’ll lead the state for the next four years, but there are others.

One is the speed and decisiveness with which cabinet members are named. These are, after all, the people who will deliver on promises made during the campaign and after. Since Ken Curtis centralized more than 100  independent agencies into a 16-member cabinet back in the 1960s, governors have been judged at least in part by the quality and durability of their department heads.

Paul LePage vowed just after the Nov. 2 election that he’d have his entire cabinet in place by year’s end. That hasn’t happened, which is not unusual — the process takes time – but what is unusual is that only four were named, including one reappointment. None of the four will head the state departments that have the biggest effect on Mainers and spend by far the most money: Health and Human Services, Education, and Transportation. On Friday, three more commissioners were announced — Environmental Protection, Marine Resources, and Economic and Community Development.

What can we infer from this slow process? LePage has made part of it clear by saying several of his first choices turned down the job because of inadequate pay. This brought catcalls from various quarters, but the governor has a point.

What is not widely known is that cabinet pay is tied to that of the governor. The range goes higher, by a factor of a third, but the governor of Maine makes $70,000 a year, and has for the past 24 years.

Trying to find an HHS commissioner to manage a budget, including federal funding, that exceeds $2 billion a year for $100,000 is actually not easy — not when many non-profit salaries in Maine greatly exceed that. The average college president’s pay nears $200,000 and hospital CEOs make up to $500,000. True, all these figures are above the median wage, but then few of us manage $2 billion budgets.

Raising government salaries is always a political footfall — it helped prompt a Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, for instance, though – strangely enough — congressmen who then took office continued to raise their pay in subsequent years.

Maine tried to take the politics out of the matter, or at least put it to the side, through a pay commission recommending salaries for top figures in the executive branch and Legislature.

It was such a commission that engineered the last increase in gubernatorial, and hence cabinet, pay. The $35,000 that Joe Brennan got each of his eight years as governor was doubled when John McKernan took office in 1987. Maine’s constitution, like many states, forbids increasing or decreasing a governor’s pay while in office.

Subsequently, the commission’s oversight of governor’s salaries was removed and it now takes a bill from a legislator to do the job, and few have been forthcoming. The last nearly successful attempt came in 2002, when a quickly assembled advisory panel proposed a raise to $100,000. It passed the House, but was blocked by a rebellion of Senate Democrats – odd, because Baldacci was already the clear front-runner, but then there’s no accounting for pay raise politics. When in doubt, vote no seems to sum it up.

The last debate on gubernatorial pay, an interesting one, came in 2006, when a back-bench Republican Rep. Gary Moore filed a bill to set the governor’s pay 10 percent higher than any other state official. Since this includes some fairly pricey forensic doctors at state mental hospitals — $135,000 and up — this probably wasn’t practical. In committee, though, two Democratic senators proposed an amendment to set pay at twice the state’s median household income, which would then have been $102,744, and adjusted every four years after that. The plan produced only muted outrage, and could have settled the issue.

But this time, while the Senate narrowly approved, the House wanted no part of a Senate plan and squashed it, 123-17. If it had passed, Gov. LePage would have had a more reasonable salary schedule to offer people running multi-billion-dollar agencies.

Instead, decisions languish. Eventually, Paul LePage will have a cabinet. But we will already know these commissioners weren’t his first choices.

Some will always argue that, whatever we pay government officials, it’s too much. But you do get what you pay for.

Perhaps some brave, maverick legislator can sponsor another bill this year that will have no impact at all on this biennial budget or the next. But in four or eight year’s time, it could prevent an already nagging problem from growing worse.

Douglas Rooks is a former daily and weekly newspaper editor who has covered the State House for 25 years. He can be reached at [email protected].