Lawmakers and lobbyists start the 2014 legislative session Monday with this understanding: the days of unlimited spending on expensive dinners, sporting events and cocktails are gone.
How gone, exactly, is the big question. Last year, legislators acceded to the will of the people that the General Assembly limit gifts from lobbyists. The result was a $75 cap on individual spending, plus an outright ban on free sports tickets and golf outings.
Senators and representatives hailed the reforms as both historic and straightforward, but they were only half right. Elements of the new law have so perplexed the Georgia Professional Lobbyists Association that it is drafting a letter with dozens of questions for the state ethics commission about how the law will work.
“Every time we look at the law we come up with new questions, new interpretations,” said Jet Toney, chairman of the lobbyist group. “We’re talking about dozens of registered lobbyists who are experienced (and are) taking a lot of time to study the law and trying to determine what is allowed behavior.”
For example, how does the $75 limit apply if three lobbyists take one legislator out to dinner? Are they limited to spending $25 apiece, or can they each spend $75? Another example: the limit applies to “public officials,” but does it also apply to their spouses or staffers?
And there is this question, which describes a practice that the public probably doesn’t know about: lobbyists “regularly have public officials request that they pay for dinner for the public official plus a local delegation.” That delegation “may include county or city elected officials or local business leaders.” In an early draft of its letter, the lobbying group asks whether this practice is still allowed.
The public doesn’t know about this because lobbyists have never had to tell anyone about it. They must disclose spending on legislators, but they have no obligation to report how much they dropped on dinner and drinks for the legislator’s guests.
‘Drafted in the middle of the night’
State Sen. Josh McKoon, R-Columbus, an advocate of tough ethics laws, said problems with the new measure were inevitable.
“It’s not surprising to me there are issues because this law was drafted in the middle of the night without very much input from stakeholders who had been working on it for years,” McKoon said.
Working in secret, House and Senate leaders negotiated over the bill past midnight on the penultimate day of the session last year, and both chambers passed it in the final hours of the final day.
McKoon, who thought the bill was a good start but lacked key changes, wants to give the attorney general power to call statewide grand juries to investigate public corruption. He also supports creating a permanent funding source for the state ethics commission that amounts to roughly $4.5 million a year.
But McKoon advocates patience for the new law, particularly the part that gives the ethics commission power again to interpret the law and create new regulations passed on its review.
“The commission, since it now has authority to promulgate rules again, we should let them exercise that authority,” McKoon said.
That is unlikely to happen, however, before the end of the 2014 session, leaving lobbyists and lawmakers to interpret the rules on their own. As a result, both groups say they will tread carefully.
Clint Mueller, lobbyist for the Association of County Commissioners of Georgia, said he thinks most experienced lobbyists will take a conservative approach to the 2014 session.
“If there’s any doubt, then don’t do it,” he said.
For instance, spending on legislative staff may not be subject to the cap or even required to be reported, but Mueller said the wiser path is to “report everything.”
‘Misinformation being spread by lobbyists’
In a press conference Thursday, House Speaker David Ralston, R-Blue Ridge, said the new reforms need to be given time to work. He said the General Assembly is educating its own members about the reforms they passed, but they are fighting some bad information.
“Some of the misinformation that is being spread about what we did last year is being spread by these lobbyists,” he said. “One of the things that didn’t get reported last year was that was where some of the stronger opposition was coming from. Now some of those people are distributing information that just is not correct.”
Some lawmakers say the rules seem simple enough to them.
“I’ve always had a good sense of that,” Rep. Alan Powell, R-Hartwell, chairman of the House Public Safety Committee, said. “It basically says there’s a $75 limit on what anybody can spend on me as a legislator. You can’t take me to any sporting events, you can’t take me to play golf and you can’t buy a ticket for me.
“Ethics starts with the individual,” he said.
‘Even if it’s an accident, it’s a story’
The strictness or laxity of the new rules may be less important than the understanding that the voting public is fed up with the endless lobbyist-funded buffet. Since 2011, when public debate began to heat up over the practice, total spending by lobbyists is down about 50 percent, a review of disclosure reports by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found.
Supporters of the law have made much of $75 limit on lobbyists, but less attention has been paid to a passage buried deep in the bill putting the first requirements on politicians to watch their behavior.
The law forbids public officials from accepting a prohibited gift – like a round of golf or a $76 dinner – from a registered lobbyist if they have “actual knowledge” the gift is forbidden.
Former ethics commission executive secretary Rick Thompson, who now helps politicians comply with state ethics laws, announced this month a new monitoring service for lawmakers to track lobbyists gifts disclosed in their name.
“I spoke at the GOP House Caucus and talked about it a little there. There are quite a few legislators that didn’t actually know they are going to have to monitor it,” he said.
The requirement that lawmakers have “actual knowledge” that their gift was forbidden makes it difficult to enforce, but Thompson said that will not stop political opponents from filing complaints against lawmakers whose gifts crack the cap. In a primary, an embarrassing story in the local newspaper is worse than any fine, he said.
“Even if it’s an accident,” he said, “it’s a story.”
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