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Thursday, December 01, 2005

Ind. Law - Limits on lobbying, campaign reporting urged by Fort Wayne paper

Two editorials today in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette.

"The door still spins: Lobbying limits needed for former lawmakers" is the heading to the first. Some quotes:

When legislators leave the Indiana General Assembly, they seldom wander far from the Statehouse. The list of lawmakers who return to lobby former colleagues on behalf of public and private interests is long. As the 2006 session draws near and new faces appear in both the House and Senate, a debate over the revolving door is warranted.

Rep. Phyllis Pond, R-New Haven, filed a bill in the last session that would have barred any legislator from registering as a lobbyist in the one-year period after leaving office. Her bill was never called for a hearing.

“It’s a good idea whose time hasn’t come,” Pond said Wednesday. “It’s something I still feel very strongly about. There are so many of those lawmakers who use their time in the legislature to get a high-paying job as a lobbyist. They use the friendships they’ve made to get access.”

Pond said she didn’t expect to file the legislation in the upcoming short session but said she would like to drum up support for the measure, preferably one calling for a two-year ban on lobbying activities for former lawmakers.

“Unfortunately, it seems to take a scandal to get these passed,” she said.

"Better campaign reporting" is the second editorial. Some quotes:
Campaign finance laws have been the focus of national attention in recent years, but problems in Indiana’s laws have been largely ignored. Legislators need to update and improve the laws governing local races, and the No. 1 goal should be to make campaign finance reports more accessible.

The Indiana Secretary of State’s office maintains an excellent Internet site that allows citizens to view the campaign reports of candidates for statewide office and for the General Assembly. Voters can search for contributors as well as candidates. For local offices, though, the information is only available by viewing the paper records at election board offices. To see whether a specific individual or company gave to a candidate, voters have to review reams of paper, page by page.

Some local reports list donations by order of contribution date; some list them alphabetically; some almost randomly. Some are typewritten and easy to read; others are handwritten and almost indecipherable.

The Secretary of State’s office hires staff and contractors to manually input the contributions, a step that increases the chance for error. The inputting is not an option for local election boards, which cannot afford the labor.

In addition to being labor intensive, past experiments with manually inputting data uncovered math errors that could not be reconciled, said Pam Finlayson, director of the Allen County Election Board. The software being tested demanded all the figures add up – and they too often did not.

The best answer – for both candidates and voters – is for campaign finance reports to be filed digitally, either online or on discs delivered to election board offices. Those reports, in turn, should be available online with search functions comparable to those already offered for statewide candidates.

Comment: This is a good idea. But for a good idea gone bad, see this 10/31/05 ILB entry titled "Putting lobbying records online is fiasco in Congress."

Posted by Marcia Oddi on December 1, 2005 09:17 AM
Posted to General Law Related