Transparency & Disclosure

When it comes to lobbying disclosure, local government agencies should lead the way. According to an article in the San Diego Reader, this is not the case with the San Diego Airport Authority, whose lobbying firm did not disclose any of the lobbying it did for the Authority in the first half of 2015.

In my chapter on local lobbying, I argue that even quarterly disclosure of lobbying activities is not sufficiently timely and that lobbyists' disclosures should be supplemented by the disclosures of high-level officials.

ALEC has gone local. No, not Alec Baldwin. ALEC is the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization that for the last few years has been drafting conservative legislation for state legislatures.

The principal value of lobbying, according to both lobbyists and government officials, is the expert information lobbyists provide. The view is often stated that, with the resources they have, government officials could not effectively do their job without the expertise they obtain from lobbyists.

Gretchen Morgenson's investigative piece in yesterday's New York Times is extremely disturbing.

Most people believe that lobbyists are guns hired to influence government officials, and most lobbying laws reflect this by applying only to those who lobby, not to the clients for whom they lobby. Unlike most laws, lobbying laws focus on agents rather than their principals.

When a lobbying code requires that lobbyists report "specific lobbying issues" or "the subjects on which they have lobbied," what exactly is required? The best approach is to include more specific language in the disclosure section, such as "information sufficient for an ordinary member of the public to identify the law or resolution, contract, grant, regulation, real property or project, rule, proceeding, board or commission determination, or other matter."

Good news and bad news about lobbying from New York City's new mayor. The good news, according to a recent article on the Capital New York website, is that the mayor has said that his administration will disclose "substantive" meetings that members of his administration conduct with lobbyists. This is, he says, a practice he followed when he was the city's public advocate (a sort of ombuds), before he was elected mayor.

One of the great things about discussions of the conflicts of interest of people in the securities world is that "fiduciary duty" is considered the basis for the rules that govern their relationship with government officials and others. In discussions of the conflicts of interest of those whom they deal with in municipal governments and those who provide other sorts of advice or products to municipal governments, "fiduciary duty" often goes unmentioned.