Campaign Finance & Pay-to-Play

It's questionable whether a contractor, developer, grantee, or other individual or entity that seeks special benefits from a local government should be permitted to make sizeable campaign contributions to candidates for positions in the local government. But if they are not permitted to make such contributions directly, they should not be permitted to make them indirectly, either.

Recently, the hiring of lobbyists to represent cities before state and federal governments and agencies has become controversial. Some people think this is an inappropriate use of taxpayer funds. I don't agree. However, the hiring of external lobbyists (as opposed to government officials who do the lobbying themselves) does raise some government ethics issues, because it adds to the mix highly politicized contractors.

One Indian tribe wants to build a casino, another tribe already has one in the area and doesn't want competition. You're a council member in the city that can effectively block the casino from being built. Both tribes want your support, and are willing to back up that support with campaign contributions. What do you do?

In a recent blog post, the background issue was the effect of independent spending on a local public campaign financing program in Santa Fe.

An interesting article in today's New York Times focuses on an unusual feature of an unhealthy local government ethics environment. This feature is payment for votes, something we think of in terms of old city machines. In this case, it involved school board elections in Donna, TX, a town of 16,000. The FBI, rather than local prosecutors, made the arrests.

It was pointed out to me by Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School Los Angeles, that back in 2000 John Copeland Nagle, a professor at Notre Dame Law School, wrote a law review article suggesting what I call the Westminster Approach to campaign contributions from those seeking benefits from the recipient official's government. The article, which focuses on Congress, is entitled "The Recusal Alternative to Campaign Finance Legislation" (37 Harv. J. on Legis. 69 (2000)).

An editorial in yesterday's New Orleans Times-Picayune points out a problem that is common to many ethics programs that have jurisdiction over both conflicts of interest and campaign finance:  campaign finance sucks up the program's resources, leaving too few resources for other things, including the collection of the fines they impose.

Update: February 7, 2014
It took the Jon Stewart Show three months to catch up with the City Ethics blog, but it was worth the wait. You have to watch the video they made about the Coralville, IA situation I discuss below. The defense of what occurred is truly incredible.

When people write about public campaign financing programs, they tend to focus on participation percentages and the size of the campaign contributions.

We often hear elected officials saying, "I can't be bought at any price." The assumption behind this statement is that there is no amount of money, no job offer, nothing that will make the elected official act or vote any way than the way he otherwise intends to act or vote, that he cannot be influenced.