Category Archives: lobbyists

Kauai poised to finally require lobbyist registration and disclosure

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Six months ago, in July 2013, my weekly column at Civil Beat pointed to Kauai County’s failure to regulate lobbyists (“Hawaii Monitor: Kauai’s Free Range Lobbyists“).

But on Wednesday, the Kauai County Council’s Committee of the Whole voted unanimously in favor of a bill to regulate lobbyists. It is now scheduled for a final vote at the council’s January 16 meeting.

I wasn’t able to navigate the council’s document system yesterday to find the text of this final version of the measure, but here’s how it was described by the Garden Island newspaper.

A lobbyist, according to a draft version of the bill, is defined as any individual who is paid to engage or is engaged in lobbying or lobbying activities on a particular county government issue or action for more than five hours in any month or spends more than $750 during the county’s six-month financial disclosure period.

The ordinance, however, would exempt individuals who represent themselves; federal, state or county employees acting within their official duties; media companies; attorneys in an advisory capacity; and certain experts and consultants.

The proposed bill also included amendments expanding the amount of financial information that must be disclosed, including how much is spent on print, electronic, broadcast or other media advertisements, and changed the registration deadline date from Jan. 31, 2014 to Jan. 31, 2015.

It would also exempt 501(c)(3) nonprofit employees from registering as lobbyists but require them to submit financial disclosure forms.

Members of county advisory committees or tasks forces would also be barred from lobbying on topics being considered by those boards.

The county Office of Boards and Commission, which will maintain all the financial and registration records, must also post the forms on a department-maintained website within 10 business days of it being received by the Board of Ethics.

Council chair Jay Furfaro said the bill will “help us be compliant with the other counties….”

While I’m glad to see the county finally take this step, the chairman’s comment sort of underplays the matter. The problem isn’t that Kauai wasn’t keeping up with the other counties. The problem is that the State Constitution includes a requirement that each of the counties establish an ethics commission that, among other things, regulates lobbyists. Kauai simply failed to comply for decades.

Correction: Legislators told it was illegal to accept those gift DVDs

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I made a mistake. Yes, it happens. The error crept into my Civil Beat column this week when I overlooked the asymmetrical nature of the gift provisions in the state’s ethics law.

While writing the column, I refreshed my memory of the ethics issues by looking at the “resolution of charge” in the matter that was made public by the State Ethics Commission. It described the charges brought against Relativity Media and focused on disclosure, rather than whether the DVD sets given as gifts were proper.

In the column, I wrote:

Despite the relationship between Relativity’s push for increased credits and its lavish (and, at the time, undisclosed) spending, the Ethics Commission did not find the gifts to be prohibited.

It did, however, require compliance with reporting requirements. The law requires lobbyists to publicly disclose any expenditures of $25 or more per day lobbying any legislator. The amount could include the cost of gifts, meals, entertainment, or other expenses. Those gifts must also be reported by the legislator if they total $200 or more from a single source in a year.

Incorrect.

Here’s the problem with what I wrote. It was technically correct to say that the commission “did not find the gifts to be prohibited,” as long as this referred to the giving of gifts.

However, as I was reminded yesterday, the commission did determine that it was illegal for any legislator or state employee to solicit or accept these gifts under the circumstances. They advised that recipients had to either return the gifts or pay fair market value for them. Otherwise, acceptance would violate state law.

So that’s the trick. The state ethics laws apply to officers and employees of the state. It does not apply to others. So the gift provisions set out conditions under which a state officer or employee, including legislators, may not accept a gift without violating the law. Meanwhile, third parties, including lobbyists and special interests, are free to offer those same gifts as long as they are properly disclosed. Of course, if the gifts were accompanied by explicit agreements for officials to take actions in exchange for the gifts, that would be a a different matter. Not a matter of ethics but of bribery.

So in this case of Relativity Media’s DVDs, giving the gifts did not violate the law, but accepting the gifts did. And that’s the fine print I failed to note.

This week on Civil Beat: Hawaii Monitor looks at “American Jungle”

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My weekly column over at CivilBeat.com, which appears most Wednesdays, was prompted by an unusual state press release critical of a cable series running on History called “American Jungle.”

When the Star-Advertiser first reported on the state’s press release, which called the series’ portrayal of hunting in Hawaii ““inaccurate, offensive, and in some cases, potentially illegal,” it mentioned the program is produced by Relativity Media LLC. That’s the same company that paid an $8,500 fine to settle charges that it violated state lobbying laws while pushing for a substantial increase in public funding for film and video productions.

Later. a friend called and bent my ear about the situation. He had noted that news reporting had not connected the this latest production with the earlier controversy over undisclosed lobbying expenditures.

So when I sat down to write my column this week, I tried to connect the dots.

You can read the column at Civil Beat, but if you don’t subscribe and have reached your free quota, a copy is also available here.

Don’t miss Al Jazeera’s reporting on California political corruption case

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Speaking of lobbying and lobbyists, there’s been quite a bit of interesting stuff coming out recently.

For example, if you haven’t dug into Al Jazeera America’s coverage of the latest FBI corruption sting in California, you’ve been missing out (“Exclusive: Hollywood sting/FBI investigation of a California political dynasty uncovers alleged bribery and corruption in the shadows of Tinseltown“).

The basics of the story are drawn from a sealed FBI affidavit, obtained by Al Jazeera, which was used to support a search warrant for the offices of State Senator Ron Calderon who represents a suburban Los Angeles district. It is quite a tale.

The document lays out a sordid tale of alleged bribery and corruption. Undercover FBI agents posed as independent movie executives interested in taking advantage of a program in which films with budgets of $1 million or more are eligible for special tax credits. The agents, focusing on Calderon, asked the senator to help lower the budget threshold to $500,000. Calderon, who chairs the Senate Select Committee on California’s Film and Television Industries, agreed to help lower it to $750,000 but wanted financial assistance provided to his grown children, the affidavit says.

On June 21, 2012, for instance, in a restaurant in Pico Rivera, Calif., outside Los Angeles, Calderon said he could lower the budget threshold if the movie executive would hire his daughter, Jessica.

“There might be a play, you know, to lower the tax credit.” He went on: “Any help you could do for my kids is — you know, that’s diamonds for me.”

The agent agreed to hire Calderon’s daughter for $3,000 a month if the senator could help reduce the movie budget threshold “sooner rather than later.”

They had a deal. Calderon’s wife, Ana, would draw up an employment agreement for Jessica and the movie executive. That written agreement, Calderon said, was “to keep it legit.” The FBI summarized his thinking in the court document: “You never take money directly from people and you have to be careful about a tit-for-tat relationship.”

It goes on from there. It’s definitely a cautionary tale of what can happen behind the scenes in the centers of political power.

But, according to Al Jazeera, there’s more (“FBI: California state senator aided alleged multimillion-dollar fraud“).

State Sen. Ronald Calderon accepted bribes from a Southern California hospital executive who ran an alleged workers’ compensation scheme that brought the executive tens of millions of dollars, according to a sealed FBI affidavit obtained by Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit.

In exchange for payments to family members, Calderon, a Democrat who represents a suburban district here, protected the interests in Sacramento of Michael Drobot, who ran a busy spinal surgery clinic in Long Beach, Calif., the affidavit says. The document says Calderon ensured that changes to state law would not injure Drobot’s lucrative business of providing spinal fusion surgery, which joins two or more vertebrae.

An overview of Al Jazeera’s reporting can be found here. And also check out this column from the Sacremento Bee by Dan Morain, “The investigation into Ron Calderon isn’t happening in a vacuum.”

But for a different view of lobbying, check out the list of “rules for successful lobbying” laid out by lobbyist George Platt in Broward County, Florida, and reported by the Sun Sentinel.

There are currently 33 rules on the growing list, beginning with “Always tell the truth,” and ending with, ” Be careful what you say in casual conversation unless you want to read it in a blog.”

There’s a whole lot of substance in between.

Let us know what you think.