Here's a fun new way to find out what your elected officials are doing up in Richmond. The Virginia Public Access Project, for years now the place to go to find campaign finance data, now offers a database of lobbying activity in the state.
It's fun, fascinating, worrisome, and also disturbingly unreliable.
And that's not a knock on VPAP. It's a knock on Virginia's method of collecting this data, and it's utter lack of a means to see if it's accurate.
VPAP took the forms filed by lobbyists and their clients and reduced them to a terrifically well put-together database that allows you to track lobbying activity by who hired the lobbyist, who the lobbyist is, who got lobbied, the restaurants where they got lobbied, and so on.
As our Richmond reporter, Mike Sluss, reported in today's paper, you can learn some eye-opening stuff from the database. For example, payday lenders spent nearly $4 million on lobbying efforts to defeat legislation that put new restrictions on their industry.
But you can get a lot more details. Check out, for example, the popularity of Washington Redskins tickets as a lobbying carrot.
So there's data there, but at some levels, it's hard to tell if it's complete, if it's accurate, and if it says what you think it says.
That's because the state's reporting requirements are about as air-tight as the fishnets on the cigarette girl at the Tobacco Company.
As Sluss reports, the forms are filed with the office of the Secretary of the Commonwealth, but that office "does not have any type of auditing powers" to ensure the completeness or accuracy of the reports, said Chris Frink, the office's lobbying specialist.
Is it me, or does that fact sound like an invitation to write down whatever you want, who is ever going to check? (Well, except for you and me, now that we can look at this stuff online.)
The form asks filers to describe the lobbying activities conducted. Sluss cites one example in a filing by Phillip Morris USA: "All matters pertaining to the manufaccture, distribution, sale and use of tobacco products." Well, that's useful information. They might as well have written, "None of your @#$%!! business." And if they had, who would have known the difference?
Another issue has to do with the numbers they report. The reports require naming legislators who attend functions with a cost of $50 per person or more. Apparently, the common practice is to take the cost and divide it by the number of people in attendance. That might be appropriate for a catered affair that was actually billed per head. But what if it's a dinner where everyone orders off the menu, and Delegate X orders a $35 steak, the creme broulee and two bottles of wine, while Senator Y stops in for one cocktail? Using the division of the total cost, it would appear on the report lawmakers X and Y both received the same benefit from the lobbyist, which is both grossly inaccurate and grossly unfair to Senatory Y.
In fact, Sluss cites an example very much like that, in which House of Delegates Majority Leader Morgan Griffith (R-Salem) attended a function where he, after much offering, said he accepted a glass of tea or cranberry juice. But on the report filed for that event, Griffith was down for a full $127 share of the bill.
And then there's this: divide the bill by enough people to get it to below $50 per person, and you don't have to name names
No doubt there are some lobbyists and clients out there who don't abuse this slack system and follow the spirit of the law even though they apparently don't have to.
But the transparency of our political process demands something weightier than the spirit of the law. Spirits are fleeting things. Spirits have no teeth. And this is a situation in serious need of some teeth.
Now, let's see, where are those teeth going to come from? Who makes laws in this state? Oh, yes, the very legislators who can exploit this vaguery to the own benefit, if they so choose.
Legislators can be persuaded. But who is going lobby them to make such a change?
