Lobbyist rolls with the ups and downs

And that money has created opportunities for malfeasance, sometimes involving lobbyists. Marylanders like to be known for their crab cakes, but the Old Line State also has a reputation for corruption. In the state’s largest city, Baltimore, graft is so pervasive HBO made a television series, “The Wire,” based on it. The city’s mayor just resigned after a corruption conviction.

Despite those problems, or perhaps because of them, Maryland has lobbyist and legislators rules today that are much tougher than Georgia.

At least two officials, a Republican delegate (the Maryland term for representative) and a Democratic senator, who both serve on a special ethics committee, said they like the rules because they create a clear line between the legislator and the lobbyist.

Lobbyists can’t give legislators gifts or one-on-one meals. Lobbyists have to tell the ethics commission exactly how much they make, while in Georgia, lobbyists just have to report whether a client paid them more than $10,000 in a specific year. The commission conducts lobbyist audits and requires more than 12,000 state employees to file gift disclosures. The state’s legislators also have to file gift and meal disclosures. About a fourth of all the disclosures are audited every year by law.

The General Assembly also has a Joint Committee on Legislative Ethics, which has a staff attorney, their ethics adviser, who meets with each of the state 188 representatives every year to discuss ethics.

Robert Hahn, executive director of the Maryland State Ethics Commission, said the gift and meal ban for executive branch employees is permanent, while it is in effect for the legislature only when it is in session.

He said when the ethics rules were first set out in Maryland, the document was 29 pages long. Today, it’s 81 pages, he said. Hahn said many lobbyists gripe about the rules, but go along with them.

William Somerville has been the General Assembly’s ethics adviser since the late 1990s, when two scandals involving prominent lobbyists prompted the legislature to create the position.

Back in the 1970s, lobbyists and legislators had few rules, he said.

“There was a lot of schmoozing going on,” Somerville said.

The first strong state ethics law came in 1979. Many changes followed and some balked at the new rules. But Somerville said these days politicians “tend to be more serious, more wonkish.”

He added: “The culture of what ordinary people think is proper has definitely changed in Maryland.”

Susan Aumann, a Republican delegate from Baltimore County who serves on the Joint Committee on Legislative Ethics, said legislators still talk to lobbyists on a range of issues for the simple reason that “you can’t know everything about everything.”

But she said the rules are in place to keep an appropriate distance between the two groups. She said one-on-one dinners are a thing of the past and even committee dinners are becoming rare.

Jamie Raskin, a law professor and Democratic senator from Silver Spring who also sits on the joint committee, said, “The best thing you can do is have really, really clear walls of separation... I want to talk to anybody, but I don’t need to be buttered up first.”

Raskin said he is wary of lobbyists and worries about getting co-opted. He ran as a reformer and recalls what another lawmaker told him after he took office in 2007.

“ ‘When you’re campaigning, it’s a cesspool,’” the legislator said. “ ‘When you’re in, it’s a Jacuzzi.’”

Bruce Bereano, perhaps the best-known and most controversial lobbyist in Annapolis, considers lobbying a denigrated but essential part of the legislative process. In the 1970s, he helped draft Maryland’s first rules for lobbying. In the 1980s and 1990s, he became the busiest lobbyist in town, earning more than $1 million in some years.

But in 1994, he was indicted on federal charges that he was defrauding clients. He was convicted and sentenced to community service, fines, time in a halfway house and then house arrest. That and other scandals spurred the state to tighten rules.

Through it all, Bereano kept his lobbyist registration and he continued lobbying. Today, he is again one of Maryland’s most successful lobbyists.

But it is a different world, Bereano said, and one that isn’t better. He said lobbying legislators in their offices, when they are pressed for time, doesn’t work as well as solo dinners. And out of the office, legislators are afraid to spend time with lobbyists because of how it will look.

“The camaraderie, the interaction of the legislators with each other has been changed in a detrimental way,” he said.

He said he meticulously follows the law now, but works around rules when he can. He can’t take legislators out during session, so he takes them out at other times, and discloses the expense.

The tightened rules in Maryland have not crippled the lobbying industry. Bereano brought in more than $800,000 in 2008, the last year such data is available. Total compensation that year to all Maryland lobbyists was $36.8 million. How did this compare to what Georgia lobbyists were paid? No one has any idea.