New angle for Conflicts of Interest & Campaign Finance

Monday, December 24th, 2007

DonMc

In a very interesting step recently, the "Zionsville Town Council approved 5-0 Monday, Dec. 3, an expanded conflict of interest policy that includes a clause urging council members to recuse themselves from any vote involving a campaign contributor."
Read the entire story here: http://www.timessentinel.com/local/local_story_339174630.html

This cuts right to the heart of the lobbyists power: they gather campaign contributions together for elected officials in order to hold a position of power for those officials later - as they KNOW that these people are key contributors to their campaigns. (for the NEXT election...) so this will be a very interesting experiment - can we by doing something like this help to reduce the imbalance of power that can be seen in the current status quo (in most cities and counties)

Quote:
"Conflict of interest is governed by a state statute that requires town council members to recuse themselves from a vote that involves any financial benefit for the member, but the council decided to go one step further. The policy said town council members should also recuse themselves from votes involving the financial interests of campaign contributors."

Seems to me that this may backfire somehow - the law of unintended consequences: if you stop a strong flow in one place (to use a watery analogy), then you can likely expect a new flow in some other place.

Story Topics:

Comments

Robert Wechsler says:

Wed, 2007-12-26 17:57

Permalink

There are two principal ways of dealing with this problem of favoring campaign contributors. One, the most common, is simply requiring the disclosure of which contractors or lobbyists (and less often developers) have made contributions, at least over a certain amount (which is often high). This requires a lot of vigilance, and even then, nothing can actually be done.

The second way is to prevent contractors, lobbyists, and developers from making campaign contributions, or preventing PACs from making contributions. But there are first amendment free speech problems here. Public financing programs can be useful in this situation, because they tie limitations such as no business or PAC contributions to the voluntary decision to join the program and get public money.

Zionsville's third approach could be effective, depending on how it is handled. It would, for example, effectively prevent contributions from being made by developers to potentially sympathetic members of boards that deal with property issues. But how would it limit officials, for example, from putting pressure on procurement people to give contracts to campaign contributors?

It doesn't look like the experiment in Zionsville will hold up. It sounds as if the new council will get rid of the new conflict of interest clause, probably arguing, as one member does in the article, that it's hard to know who gave a contribution. That's disingenuous. They know. Sizeable contributions from contractors and developers and lobbyists don't just show up in the mail to be opened by a kid and deposited in the bank without the politician knowing.

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research, City Ethics