The Center for Public Integrity

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.   

Michigan House Democrats have cited the state’s failing grade from the State Integrity Investigation in a resolution calling for investigation of alleged election irregularities.

“A recent report by the State Integrity Investigation ranked Michigan’s government 43^rd in the country in terms of accountability and risk of corruption,” stated the resolution, issued earlier this week. “The report card gave Michigan an ‘F’ grade in areas like campaign finance and legislative accountability among other areas.”

Michigan also received F’s in the categories of executive accountability, judicial accountability, civil service management, lobbying disclosure, pension fund management, ethics enforcement, insurance commission, and redistricting. It received a single A grade for internal auditing.

Overall, Michigan received an F and a score of 58 percent on the State Integrity Investigation.

South Carolina State Sen. Mike Rose is a lucky man. The Republican lawmaker from Summerville known for championing ethics reform lost his primary bid, with his opponent winning 60 percent of the vote — but he can still stay in office. 

How is that possible? Rose is an incumbent in an election year that has seen roughly 250 non-incumbent candidates kicked off ballots all across South Carolina because of a controversial State Supreme Court decision and a filing technicality related to campaign paperwork.

It used to be that candidates had to file a business disclosure form, called a Statement of Economic Interest, to their party official along with their petition for candidacy. But in 2010, the law was changed to mandate they also file electronically with the state’s ethics agency.

So, many candidates filed online or in person, but not both. Some did neither. (Incumbents were exempt because they already had a copy on file.)

After a lawsuit was filed to determine the fate of those who hadn’t filed properly, the State Supreme Court ruled in May that any candidate who did not file both online and in person should be removed from the ballot.

The fallout was catastrophic and meant that roughly 250 non-incumbent candidates for local and state offices around the Palmetto State were struck from their ballots in a year when all 170 South Carolina House and Senate seats were up for grabs. 

Reverberations from the High Court’s ruling are still being felt.

Consider state Senate candidate Sean Bennett who beat incumbent Rose nearly a month ago by a large margin at the polls.

A South Carolina state senator who blocked an effort earlier this year to limit anonymous campaign spending by third-party groups is singing a slightly different tune now that a shadowy group is opposing one of his political allies.

Sen. Lee Bright, a Republican from Roebuck, appeared at a news conference in Sumter last week to support businessman Tony Barwick, who is facing a GOP runoff election for a Senate seat on June 26.

In recent weeks, a group calling itself SC Conservative Reform Council has popped up and spent several thousand dollars on direct mail and radio ads in support of Barwick’s opponent, Wade Kolb.

The reform council does not appear on the S.C. Ethics Commission website, where other political action committees do, nor is it registered with the S.C. Secretary of State, as are corporations and nonprofits.

Groups influencing elections in South Carolina, such as the SC Conservative Reform Council, do not have to disclose who is bankrolling them or how much money they are taking in or spending, as a result of 2010 federal court ruling in Florence, S.C. And Bright recently helped quash legislative efforts to reinstitute some sort of  disclosure rules and spending limits for such groups.  

The federal case revolved around a seemingly mundane slice of minutiae — how the word “committee” is defined under South Carolina law. But the effects of the ruling were far-reaching indeed, opening the floodgates for untraceable political spending in the Palmetto State by many independent groups seeking to influence elections.

Candidate Kolb says he does not know who is behind the SC Conservative Reform Council.    

Its only disclosure: a UPS box number in a city outside the district where the race is taking place.

Longtime Charleston Mayor Joe Riley had run a lot of high-minded races in this coastal city known for charm and manners, so nothing really prepared him for the bare-knuckle politics he faced in a re-election bid last fall. A shadowy group popped up seemingly out of nowhere and spent an untold amount of secret money to pummel Riley’s record in support of one of his rivals.

None of the mayor’s opponents declared allegiance to the anonymous group that funded TV ads, flyers and a slick website called “The Riley Files” that read like a private investigator's report. The website came complete with images of manila folders titled “Crony Capitalism” and “Misplaced Priorities” along with photos of the mayor paper-clipped to them.

No one ever found out who was behind the group calling itself Citizens for a Better Charleston. That's because new rules in South Carolina meant the group did not have to file paperwork with the state or disclose what it was doing, how much it was spending, where its money was coming from and who was bankrolling it.

The mayor won his re-election campaign, but the victory came with a few bruises — and a lesson: in the realm of money and politics, things had changed dramatically in the Palmetto State.

In the past, an independent entity attempting to influence an election — like Citizens for a Better Charleston — would have had to file disclosure paperwork as a “committee” with the state’s ethics agency, allowing a bit of sunlight to shine on its work. 

But not anymore.

In 2010, a little-noticed ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Terry Wooten in Florence, S.C., kicked the regulatory teeth out of a key statute in the state’s campaign finance laws and opened the floodgates for untraceable political spending by many of the groups seeking to influence elections. 

As the California legislature gears up to vote on the state budget, Republicans are demanding  greater transparency in the process, citing a C- grade for the budgeting process from  the State Integrity Investigation. California ranked 4^th out of all 50 states overall with a grade of B-.

On Monday, Republicans called for a 48-hour public review of the budget plan, allowing time for citizens to voice their concerns to representatives before it goes to a vote. Lawmakers face a constitutional deadline to approve a budget for the new fiscal year by this Friday;  the fiscal year kicks off July 1. California Democrats control both legislative chambers, as well as the governor’s office.

“While Democrats talk about openness and accountability, all we have seen from them are smoke-filled rooms and back-room deals, shutting out taxpayers and the news media,” Senate Republican Leader Bob Huff (R-Diamond Bar) and Assembly Republican Leader Connie Conway (R-Tulare) stated in a press release. “Budgets thrown together behind closed doors or passed in the middle of the night are one of the main reasons why California is facing chronic deficits today.”

Sabrina Lockhart, communications director for Assembly Leader Conway, said that California’s grades on the State Integrity Investigation “bolstered our opinion that more transparency is needed,” but she also noted that Republicans have sought open government legislation for years.

Among their proposals: Bills to increase legislative transparency, eliminate late-night legislative sessions and promote an open and honest budget process.

A Republican state senator in South Carolina known for championing ethics reform legislation has gone down in an upset primary election here.

Mike Rose, a close follower of the State Integrity Investigation — which gave South Carolina an F — had planned to introduce a series of reform measures based on the report next year.

That won't happen.

Earlier this week, challenger Sean Bennett, 44, roundly beat Rose, of Summerville, with a grassroots campaign that raised $17,000, compared to the $60,000 that Rose, a 64-year-old former Judge Advocate General’s Corps officer, had in his coffers.

It will be the first time Bennett, a financial planner, has held elected office. He won with 60 percent of the vote. No Democrat has filed to run in the general election held in November.

The defeated Rose served in South Carolina's Senate from 1988 to 1996. After more than a decade out of office, he ran again in 2008 and has served since then.

Months ago, the state's Republican treasurer, Curtis Loftis, was eating lunch with Rose when John Crangle, who runs South Carolina’s state's chapter of Common Cause, approached the table.

“You'll never see a piece of ethics legislation without his name on it,” Crangle told Loftis, gesturing to Rose.

Crangle was the only lobbyist for South Carolina's last ethics overhaul bill, which passed in 1991.

Ethics issues in South Carolina government may have reached a new tipping point. 

The state's Republican governor, Nikki Haley, is the subject of an investigation by a legislative ethics panel that is looking into whether she illegally lobbied as a legislator.

A Florida research group released a report yesterday on how to improve the state’s ethics laws, using results from the State Integrity Investigation as a basis for reform. The Sunshine State ranked 18^th out of 50 states in the investigation, with an overall grade of C-.

Integrity Florida, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that promotes integrity and exposes corruption in state government, has previously held presentations around the state to share the conclusions of the State Integrity Investigation’s corruption risk scorecard for the Sunshine State. The group’s new report, “Corruption Risk Report: Florida Ethics Laws,” identifies key policy changes —  such as increasing penalties for ethics violations and creating a corruption report hotline — that could help the state move towards an A grade.

“Integrity Florida is using State Integrity Investigation results as a roadmap to focus our state-level research projects and as a scorecard to measure policy results,” the report states. 

Among the reform recommendations is a multi-faceted plan to improve ethics enforcement, a category in which Florida failed on its risk scorecard, particularly by giving the ethics commission authority to self-initiate investigations.

Early last month, lawmakers in Iowa completed work on a new open records statute. Senate File 430 creates the Iowa Public Information Board, a nine-member commission charged with enforcing the state’s open records and meetings laws.

For good government advocates in the Hawkeye State, the new legislation was cause for celebration — sort of.

Indeed, there were smiles all around as Gov. Terry Branstad signed the law on May 3 in the ornate Capitol Building, surrounded by lawmakers and journalists — many of whom spent six years on the effort. And the law is undoubtedly a victory of sorts for open government in the state, where enforcement was spotty at best, divided among several local and state entities. If a citizen’s request for information was denied, the only option was to sue — a time-consuming and costly course of action. Now, the Board can investigate complaints and bring them to court on citizens’ behalf.

It all sounds good — except for the fine print. Tacked on to the bill is an amendment that exempts “tentative, preliminary, draft, speculative, or research material” from Iowa’s open records law. Translation: a document that is part of the policy making process can be held from public view. Such language was not part of Iowa’s original open records law, enacted in 1967, and its inclusion now is troubling to some. “You can use the drafts to learn things,” said Lyle Muller, executive director of the Iowa Center for Public Affairs Journalism, a nonprofit and nonpartisan news service. “I think they are valuable. They give you an idea of what the early ideas were that were rejected.”