The speaker’s bill would require lobbyists to disclose payments that they actually make for meals, drinks, transportation and lodging for elected officials to attend a meeting. The lobbyist would not report those expenses if the client, rather than the lobbyist, paid for them.
Clarity was the rationale for dropping those trips from lobbyists’ disclosures, Ralston said in a recent interview. “If a lobbyist did not pay for something,” he said, “a requirement to disclose that they did would fail to accomplish the accuracy and transparency that we seek.”
Here’s the problem: It’s unclear whether the law requires anyone to report this spending if the lobbyists don’t. No one else seems to be disclosing this travel now. And anything involving more than one person — even a trip to the Super Bowl with a lobbyist — could be considered a “meeting.”
-------------------House Ethics Chairman Joe Wilkinson says he plans to amend the bill to make sure, one way or another, that those expenses are disclosed.
But until he does, government watchdogs say, the bill would allow special interests to shower lawmakers with travel-related gifts with no disclosure and no penalty. Smaller gifts would have to be reported if they did not involve attendance at a meeting.
“This would allow lobbyists to send legislators on a first-class, round-trip to Paris to visit the Eiffel Tower and pay for them to dine at the finest restaurants and not have to disclose them,” said Angela Speir Phelps, a former public service commissioner who’s now executive director of the consumer group Georgia Watch.
“Meanwhile, you buy a legislator a sub sandwich from Subway and a Coca-Cola and that has to be reported,” Phelps said. “It’s completely backwards and upside down and wrong.”
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