Gifts continue to rain on lawmakers

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s analysis of lobbyist disclosures for the legislative session just ended finds that lobbyists spent $866,747 — the equivalent of $9,525 per day — on gifts for lawmakers from Jan. 1 through March 31.

This rain of meals, tickets, trips and golf outings fell even as a statewide coalition called the Georgia Alliance for Ethics Reform pressed lawmakers to limit lobbyists’ gifts to $100 per event.

The coalition’s effort went nowhere. Bills were introduced in both houses to impose the cap. Neither attracted a single co-sponsor, and both died in committee.

Even so, there are signs of change coming: One prominent Republican leader decided to give back everything lobbyists gave him this session, and the lieutenant governor’s office on Friday said he plans to study the issue of lobbying later this year.

Dozens of dinners

It is often difficult to connect a lobbyist’s spending with a specific outcome in the Legislature; for example, a bill being passed or another being killed.

But it is possible to detect high levels of lobbyist activity.

For example, lobbyists representing hospitals, auto dealers, utilities and retailers took House Ways and Means Chairman Mickey Channell out for dozens of dinners over the first three months of the year, often paying the tab for his wife as well.

Channell was the sponsor of one of the session’s most significant measures: House Bill 386, a wide-ranging update to the state’s tax structure, and lobbyists fought vigorously for new tax breaks or to protect existing breaks.

Yet under the heading “Bill Number” on the report — that is, the legislation the lobbyists were seeking to influence — the letters “NA” or “N/A” are the most frequent entry, meaning the lobbyists claim that they did not discuss pending legislation with the lawmaker.

Channell said the system is “very transparent” and the dinners were “perfectly legal.” It is just part of doing business, he said.

“The bottom line is, frankly, it extends the legislative day for me,” he said. “I go to work early, and most often times go out to eat with this group or that group.”

This extension of the legislative day applied even to a Valentine’s Day dinner for Channell and his wife, Carolyn. Lobbyists for the Georgia Hospital Association and Georgia Power reported spending a total of $236.96 for the Channells’ dinner that evening.

Many of the dinners would have smashed the proposed $100 cap on lobbying gifts. Channell said he did not form an opinion on the lobbying reform proposals. His mind was on other things, including the tax rewrite, he said.

“That kept me very, very busy,” he said.

Saying no to lobbyists

There are hints that the talk of capping gifts has had an effect. This session, Senate Majority Leader Chip Rogers, R-Woodstock, quietly decided not to accept anything from lobbyists.

It was a notable shift for Rogers. Lobbyists claimed $10,771 in gifts aimed at Rogers in 2011, making him one of the top recipients in the General Assembly.

So this year he gave everything back, but kept the decision to himself for most of the session.

“I’m not trying to show up anybody. I’m not even trying to make this an issue,” he said.

He describes the Capitol culture as one in which legislators constantly receive gifts they never requested or even wanted.

“I spent considerable amounts of money paying people for things I never asked for,” Rogers said. “The problem is you don’t know who to go to, to tell them you are not taking it.”

He said he did not want to go back to his district with anything other than a zero on his lobbyist balance sheet.

Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle received $1,576 in lobbying gifts during the session — a significant number, but not enough to crack the top 10 in the Legislature. Much of the spending came on gifts sent to his office and sports tickets provided by the University System.

Cagle spokesman Ben Fry defended much of the spending as ceremonial, but he said the lieutenant governor will name a special Senate committee at the end of the summer to study lobbyist spending and develop recommendations for 2013.

“As he has done throughout his career, the lieutenant governor will continue to advocate for more transparency for all elected officials in an effort to preserve the public’s trust,” he said.

Fry said he did not know who Cagle planned to put on the committee.

‘Legalize bribery’

Most legislative leaders say there’s no need to ban lobbyists’ gifts or even impose a limit on them; it’s enough, they say, that lobbyists must publicly disclose what they spend and on whom they spend it.

Bob Irvin, a former House Republican leader who now sits on the board of Common Cause Georgia, scoffs at such assertions and says legislators must enact stricter rules to control their own behavior.

“Disclosure all by itself is not enough,” he said. “No other state in our region thinks it is. If it were, we might as well legalize bribery — so long as it’s disclosed.”

House Speaker David Ralston has said eliminating lobbying gifts would drive the practice “underground,” where the public would have less information on what is happening between lawmakers and special interests.

“They’re going to continue lobbying, advocating for or against measures,” Ralston told the AJC in January. “Then how will the public know where the intensity of the lobbying effort is?”

Critics derided that stance, saying it was ridiculous not to pass a law out of concern that someone might break it.

Marshall Guest, Ralston’s spokesman, said last week his boss “has made his position quite clear on this subject” and is “committed to ensuring the [state ethics] commission has the tools and the funding necessary to do its job.”

‘Lot of work in the dark’

The groups pushing for reform include Common Cause Georgia, the Georgia Tea Party Patriots and Georgia Watch. Jim Kulstad, a lobbyist with Common Cause, said the purported openness of the current system leaves a little to be desired.

“For a Legislature that touts transparency, they did a lot of work in the dark,” he said.

Kulstad singled out complicated tax reform legislation, which blew through the House and Senate in a matter of days. The bill had been hashed out behind closed doors with industry lobbyists for weeks or months and then sprung on the public — and many legislators — days before the final votes.

He also pointed to a fishing license bill amended on the final legislative day that would have allowed some ethics complaints against politicians to be sealed. The bill passed the Senate but died in the House when members figured out what was in it.

Supporters said it was an attempt to shield the reputations of people who were innocent of the charges or had mere “technical” violations of campaign filing requirements, but Kulstad called it a “sneak attack.”

In the Legislature’s final week, the reform coalition held a news conference to challenge lawmakers and candidates to sign a pledge that they would support gift-cap legislation next year. The pledge so far has drawn signatures from nine of 236 legislators, as well as four challengers.

What did you talk about?

After House Speaker Glenn Richardson resigned in 2009 amid a lobbying scandal, the General Assembly passed reforms pushed by Ralston to require lobbyists to report spending twice a month during the legislation session, instead of monthly.

While today reporting is more frequent — perhaps the most timely in the nation — the quality of the reports varies.

Channell, the Greensboro Republican, was the top recipient of lobbying gifts during the legislative session, but it is not easy to determine that using lobbyist records. Entering his name into the state lobbying database yields a total of $2,938.85, but that’s because Channell’s name is rendered several different ways.

Combing through the full database of nearly 6,000 reports, searching for variations on the chairman’s name, reveals a total of $4,366.49.

But even citizens who manage to figure out how much in gifts their lawmaker is taking would have a hard time figuring out why.

For 94 percent of the total spent this year on gifts, there is no indication of what the lobbyist was lobbying for, if anything. Lobbyists are only asked to disclose that information if the legislative discussion occurred at the time of the expense.

Some lobbyists even poked a little fun at the increased interest in the practice of buying gifts for legislations.

Georgia Agribusiness Council lobbyist Bryan Tolar reported buying $20 worth of biscuits for the office of Senate Agriculture Chairman John Bulloch the morning of Jan. 26, the day after an AJC reporter turned up at a dinner Tolar and other lobbyists were sponsoring for the House Natural Resources Committee. In the only space provided to tell citizens what he wanted, Tolar wrote “discussed AJC stalkers and Columbia County political history. Fascinating stuff.”

In another entry explaining why he provided coffee service to the office suite of three powerful committee chairs, Tolar wrote, “People like coffee.”

Debbie Dooley of the Georgia Tea Party Patriots said she thinks lawmakers will get more serious about changing the way they interact with lobbyists if they “feel the pain of primary opposition.”

“I think it absolutely will be an issue,” she said. “I’m already hearing from people in different parts of the state interested in running in the primary against some of the incumbents.”