Kansas legislators, especially Republicans, have nursed a long and unsettled feud with the state’s ethics commission. Last year, Republicans were incensed that party officials were subpoenaed in an investigation of alleged campaign finance violations.
They plotted revenge. Bills were introduced to neuter the Kansas Governmental Ethics Commission and gut campaign finance and disclosure laws. Lawyers got involved. The governor’s chief of staff intervened and mediated an acceptable compromise, settling yet another eruption in the angst-ridden history of ethics laws in Kansas.
In 1973 and ’74, the furor of Watergate and declining American confidence in Washington moved the Kansas Legislature to restore confidence and trust in Topeka. New campaign finance, conflict-of-interest and lobbyist disclosure laws were adopted. A commission was created to enforce them, to shed light on the influence of private forces in public business.
Many legislators, however, soon grew annoyed. Only months after the Commission began its work, the chairman, who was president of Washburn University, resigned from the board after learning of legislative threats to the school’s programs.
A year later, in February 1975, Southwestern Bell Telephone Company admitted it had furnished free credit cards and unlimited long-distance telephone privileges to members of the Kansas Corporation Commission, which regulated the company’s business in Kansas.
That same month, the speaker pro-tem of the Kansas House said he supported plans to create a legislative-lobbyist “hospitality room” near the Capitol, funded on a “sliding scale” with lobbyists paying higher membership fees than legislators. The plan quickly disappeared.
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Ethics has been a sticky issue in Topeka from the outset. Troubles in the beginning mirror the troubles today, all rooted in the messy task of regulating human behavior.
Over the summer of 1974, Lynn Hellebust, the Commission’s first executive director, was at more than a dozen meetings across Kansas to poke through a great vagueness: explaining new laws that touched on morality and ethics. The meetings were thorough and encouraging. Hellebust believed people saw the effort more as a way to certify honesty in government than a means to catch those who make mischief or worse.
But their legislators grew skeptical. They came to view the new laws with suspicion, laws they had warmly endorsed less than a year earlier. Some declared them a nuisance.
By early December 1974, a powerful coalition of Statehouse lobbyists and legislators had begun a sophisticated campaign to soften requirements that lobbyists report their monthly expenses. The campaign centered on complaints that the new law prevented them from serving on a state board and lobbying at the same time.
In reality, it didn’t. Critics were actually after the law that required them to disclose their food and liquor expenses for entertaining legislators and state employees. The law required little more than a list of expenses without naming names. There were no requirements ‒ and still aren’t ‒ to report salaries, office and staff expenses, travel, rent and other costs paid by the organizations behind the lobbyists.
But the first report, in 1975, was revealing: 560 lobbyists representing 678 interest groups spent $128,439 ( in today’s dollars, $718,208) on food, liquor and entertainment for legislators.
That news was startling on two counts: Lobbyists outnumbered legislators more than 3-1 at the Capitol; and the average expense for each of the 165 members of the House and Senate was $778 (today, $4,350).
The figures are a matter of record, but no legislator then ever admitted to being the beneficiary of nearly $800 in food and liquor. And the numbers kept going up. By 1988, more than 600 lobbyists spent $500,000 ‒ today’s dollars, $1.27 million ‒ an average of more than $3,000 per legislator ($7,629 today).
Today, the reports from hundreds of lobbyists run on for dozens of pages and hundreds of thousands of dollars; lobbyists are now required to name the legislator for whom they buy the food and drink. When the reports are out, Martin Hawver, dean of the Statehouse press, issues a “Golden Fork Award” to the legislator who accepted the most. The Award usually goes to legislators with the most power ‒ a speaker of the House, the Senate president, the chairs of influential committees.
Not much overall is changed, except that the Statehouse media, once more than a dozen fulltime reporters, has been cut to a handful. Few have time to analyze lobbying reports.
The original mission of the ethics board was not to catch crooks. If anything, it was the opposite ‒ to certify that state officials could comply with disclosure laws because they had nothing to hide.
(Next: Lobbying power)
