The Center for Public Integrity

Legislators in South Carolina have taken initial steps toward what could be the first major overhaul of the state’s ethics rules in twenty years. As the Free Times reported this morning, government watchdog groups rattled off their wish lists at a hearing held last week by a panel of state House Democrats. South Carolina earned an overall grade of F for corruption risk from the State Integrity Investigation earlier this year, and fallout from that report — along with a series of recent ethics scandals — appears to have built political consensus on the need for reforms, said John Crangle of South Carolina Common Cause.

Among the changes called for at the hearing: more robust financial disclosure requirements, new rules on PACs and the creation of a more independent ethics oversight body. State leaders have formed four separate panels to help shape a reform package, one convened by each party in the state House, one by the majority Republicans in the Senate and one at the direction of GOP Gov. Nikki Haley.

The House Republican panel will hold its first hearing Thursday morning. Crangle said it’s too early to say whether the legislature will take recommendations from the panels and adopt substantive changes in the 2013 legislative session.

Read more at the Free Times.

When state legislators in Wisconsin began work last year on a plan for redistricting, the once-a-decade process when states draw new district maps for Congress and state legislatures, they found themselves presented with non-disclosure agreements requiring them to keep their deliberations confidential.

In Ohio, the Republican National Committee kicked off a training session on redistricting for state leaders by telling them to “keep it secret.”

Democratic leaders in Illinois held dozens of public hearings after promising a more open process. But all of the meetings came before the congressional redistricting maps were released, and the Democratic majority quickly approved their own proposals with little opportunity for the public, or Republicans, to voice concerns.

In the lead up to the most recent round of redistricting, which began last year with the release of data from the 2010 census, politicians, advocates and “good government” groups nationwide pushed to open the process to citizens and allow for broader debate than in the past. The idea was that a transparent process would lead to maps that made more sense geographically and   better reflected voters’ interests.

But with few exceptions, the political parties in control of statehouses rammed their own partisan proposals through the legislatures as quickly as possible, leaving little more than nominal opportunities for the public to influence the process. In several states, legislatures outsourced the actual work to lawyers and used claims of attorney-client privilege to further exclude the public.

In  South Dakota, the ease with which campaign cash moves around has mostly put power in the hands of those who already had it — the wealthy and the state's top elected officials.

Because of lax regulations regarding how money can flow into and out of political action committees, political party funds and individual candidate funds, the state's top officeholders are able to legally skirt existing fundraising limits and get relatively large sums into campaign coffers with little effort.

The lack of oversight was, in part, responsible for the Rushmore State’s "F" grade for regulation of political finances from the State Integrity Investigation, released earlier this year.

South Dakota is one of 19 states with a system of campaign finance regulation that allows money to effectively move "sideways," says Ed Bender, executive director of the National Institute on Money in State Politics.

South Dakota and 12 other states place no limits on what state parties or political action committees can give individual candidates, according to research done by the National Conference of State Legislatures. Another six states limit PAC contributions but not party contributions.

Bender believes that this regulatory structure essentially makes South Dakota's $4,000 limit on individual contributions to campaigns irrelevant — by allowing individual contributions of up to $10,000 to go to friendly PACs that in turn give large sums — sometimes originating from a single source — to the candidate. South Dakota law allows wealthy donors to create multiple PACs, so even the $10,000 PAC giving limit can effectively  be moot.  PACS and political parties do have to report the source of their contributions.

Deep flaws in Massachusetts laws constructed to keep government honest have sustained a recurring parade of criminal and ethical misconduct charges involving public servants in the past five years, a study by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting shows.

Massachusetts earned a “C” grade earlier this year in a national State Integrity scorecard released by the Center for Public Integrity. Among its lowest scores were an “F” for the transparency of the state budget process and public access to information, a “D+” for legislative accountability and a “C-” for the effectiveness of the state Ethics Commission. Judicial accountability earned a “C+ in Massachusetts.

The anti-corruption weaknesses have been borne out in the litany of public scandals plaguing Massachusetts in recent years.They include federal convictions of two former House Speakers, federal criminal charges lodged against top state Probation officials and the federal bribery sentence imposed on a once-rising female legislator.  

At least 250 public servants in Massachusetts have been charged with crimes or ethics violations in the past five years, the NECIR analysis found. The charges range from the federal criminal cases to helping to hire friends and relatives to drug offenses. While government officials and watchdog groups say a corrupt public servant is going to find a way to break the law no matter what, wide cracks in accountability checks in Massachusetts have made it easier for misconduct to occur.   

Among the state’s biggest cities, several sprawling Dallas-area suburbs tallied the highest rate of requests to Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott last year to keep government information secret, according to a recent examination by the Center for Public Integrity.

The probe examined the number of attempts by the 20 largest Texas cities to block public requests for information in 2011, then looked at how those numbers stacked up for each city, according to the rate of requests per 100,000 population. The “winners” were not the state’s biggest cities. McKinney had the highest rate of requests asking that Abbott allow the withholding of documents sought by citizens under the Texas Public Information Act. Next up were McAllen, Garland, Mesquite, Plano and Arlington. Fort Worth was ranked eighth and Dallas ninth, giving the Fort Worth/Dallas metroplex seven of the top 10 in the rankings.

The investigation also looked at the cities’ batting averages in getting their requests approved by Abbott’s office. McKinney won full or partial approval to withhold information in 95 percent of its cases; most of those requests were partially approved, meaning some information did have to be released.

Not all cities tally their batting averages, nor does Abbott’s office, but San Antonio’s results were especially low, with only 49 percent of requests to withhold information approved, according to its available statistics. Fort Worth reported getting 92 percent of its requests to Abbott approved in full or in part in 2011, and Austin reported an approval rate of 91 percent. (Some cities reported referral numbers that differed slightly from those obtained from the attorney general’s office.)

Abbott is involved because, in most cases, Texas law requires that governmental bodies seeking to withhold information ask the attorney general for permission to do so.

AUGUSTA, Maine  — Two of the state’s top political leaders are vowing a bipartisan effort to make government ethics, accountability and transparency key issues in the upcoming legislative session.

Republican Gov. Paul LePage and House Democratic leader Emily Cain are responding to a national report that gave Maine government an “F” for its potential for corruption.

Maine ranked 46th in the “State Integrity Investigation” by three nonpartisan groups that was released in mid-March.

Cain, the Democratic House leader who is running for a Senate seat from Orono, has proposed two linked initiatives that she hopes will lead to government ethics reform.

Cain said Tuesday she will ask her fellow lawmakers to form a bipartisan, joint select committee to consider ethics reform and report out a bill in the legislative session that begins in January, 2013.

“While the report didn’t reveal that Maine is corrupt, we have a lot of things to look at to do better,” Cain said, adding that she believes key areas of concern include nepotism, cronyism, legislative financial disclosure, government transparency and citizen access to information.

Cain on Tuesday submitted a “concept draft” bill, “An Act to Strengthen Maine's Ethics Laws and Improve Public Access to Information,” that she hopes will provide a vehicle for bipartisan reform proposals.

Cain said her reform effort could succeed where others have failed in the past in part because the public is more aware now of the potential for corruption.

“I think the fact that Maine had a public blemish in that report changes a mindset for the public and for legislators,” Cain said.

Perhaps no state illustrates the political perils of ethics enforcement better than Georgia, where the ethics commission has been the nexus of more infighting, vitriol and litigation than a Univision novella.

Keeping track of all the resignations, firings, accusations and countercharges there has challenged even the most knowledgeable observers of Peach State politics. Three executive directors have resigned or been fired since 2006. Two other employees collected $405,000 in damages for allegedly wrongful termination.  Lawmakers stripped the agency of 40 percent of its funding, its power to make new rules, even its name.

Today, as public pressure builds for ethics reform in Georgia, the agency faces a host of other challenges:

• Two former top-ranking officials allege the commission fired them for investigating suspected campaign abuses by Gov. Nathan Deal.
• Thousands of candidate disclosures swamp the agency’s online filing system, paralyzing it at peak periods for many users.
• Violators continue to avoid stiffer penalties because the commission has not devoted the resources to formally notifying them.
• Thin staffing keeps the staff from reviewing even 10 percent of the tens of thousands of filings it receives each year.

Much of this has come to pass, critics say, because the commission answers to the very politicians it’s supposed to regulate and investigate. Legislative leaders set its budget, control its powers and, along with the governor, decide who its five members will be.

In the view of many of the body’s critics, that system has failed. An independent commission, says former commission chief Teddy Lee, is essential.

“It’s got to be set up in a way that it can’t be manipulated,” says Lee, “by people who have no desire to be overseen or second-guessed.”

Pinching pennies

Tight funding has hobbled the commission as far back as anyone can recall.

The North Carolina Ethics Commission has received more than 300 ethics complaints since its establishment in 2006 — but it has initiated just 18 investigations through 2010.

The Tennessee Ethics Commission, also established in 2006, has yet to find anyone guilty of an ethics violation. It has heard five complaints in five years — and thrown all of them out.

The Pennsylvania Ethics Commission takes in between 400 and 600 complaints each year. But severe budget cuts have left the panel with only five full-time investigators to handle the workload.

And last year, the Colorado Independent Ethics Commission had its full-time support staff reduced from two people to one. 

“It’s just me,” said Jane Feldman, the Colorado commission’s executive director. Feldman said she currently has an annual budget of $224,000 but — unlike commissions in many other states — no investigators or lawyers to initiate real enforcement. 

“I don’t think we’re a dirty state. I think we’re a pretty clean state,” Feldman said. “But I think there are cases, especially conflicts of interest issues, where since we don’t have an investigator we don’t follow up.”

Such tales are far from unusual. Some 41 states have government bodies that oversee and enforce state ethics laws. But an examination by the Center for Public Integrity reveals that many of them do little more than provide a false sense of security. In fact, the State Integrity Investigation — a first-of-its-kind probe of accountability in state government — gave grades of either D or F to 28 of those state ethics panels.

Arizona’s legislative session this year was as hard to track as a Stealth bomber, even for many Capitol regulars.

A bill focused on attorney’s fees turned into a controversial measure about abortion. Other bills changed subjects too. And the Legislature took just one morning of public testimony about the budget. The real wrangling over state spending was done in two months of private meetings between the governor and legislative leaders. But the details of the blueprint weren’t public until lawmakers were on the floor ready to vote.

Technology is in theory giving Arizonans unprecedented access to the Legislature, with documents posted online and meetings captured on video. But lawmakers are short-circuiting the public process, critics say, in two key areas: the budget and “strike-everything” amendments, which completely swap out the contents of a bill, often for something entirely different.

Critics say the "strikers" are the antithesis of transparency, making it harder for Arizonans to follow legislation and bypassing committee discussion. As for the state budget blueprint, more and more, the process of hashing it out has “gone underground,” said lobbyist Kevin DeMenna, a former Senate chief of staff for GOP leadership who has personally observed every legislative session since 1979.

The Legislature used to hold extensive hearings before writing a budget plan and then, after negotiating with the governor, wrap up the end product with committee hearings before taking a final vote. But that system has disappeared over the past decade.

Citing the Center for Public Integrity’s States of Disclosure project and State Integrity Investigation as a basis for reform, the nonpartisan research group Integrity Florida has issued a report calling for stronger financial disclosure requirements in the Sunshine State.

Among the report’s recommendations: requiring Florida state officials to fill out more detailed financial disclosure forms and making that information available online in a searchable database format.

Florida ranked 26^th – a grade of D – on the 2009 release of States of Disclosure, a state-by-state comparison of legislative financial disclosure laws. To improve its standing, Integrity Florida calls for adopting requirements similar to Louisiana, which dramatically raised its ranking all the way to number one in the 2009 States of Disclosure analysis. The Bayou State required all lawmakers to disclose a wide range of financial assets, including outside income, investments, and real property holdings.  Louisiana had ranked 44th in a previous States of Disclosure analysis from 2006.