From the St. Louis Post Dispatch:
Ill. group lobbying expenses disclosed
By Kevin McDermott
POST-DISPATCH SPRINGFIELD BUREAU
04/22/2008
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — Former Illinois state Rep. Steve Davis no longer gets a legislative salary, but he's still making money from Metro East taxpayers: Madison County education and transit officials paid him about $33,000 in the past year to lobby his former colleagues in state government, records show.
It's part of about $5 million spent in the past fiscal year by cities, counties and other public entities all over Illinois to lobby Springfield, according to a new study. They include everything from Southwestern Illinois College ($42,000 spent on lobbyists) to the Collinsville Metropolitan Expositional Authority ($1,500) to the towns of Swansea ($40,000), Millstadt ($30,000) and O'Fallon ($29,000).
It's legal, and common, to use hired guns to push a legislative agenda, even for public entities.
The Illinois Campaign for Political Reform, which compiled the study and released it on Monday, found that $223,600 was paid to four lobbying firms by the Chicago area's Regional Transportation Authority, and $127,257 in lobbying contracts were paid by the city of Chicago. Individual lobbyists' monthly fees to the public entities were typically between $1,500 and $3,000, though some were as high as $12,500.
Those figures were available for the study because public entities are required to reveal what they pay to lobbyists and other contractors. Private companies or industries spend far more on lobbyists than do public entities, but they don't have to report those figures.
The reform group wants Illinois law changed to make that information public.
"What the public doesn't know is what special interests in the private sector are spending to try to pass or kill legislation," ICPR Director Cynthia Canary said in a written statement.
The reform group also wants legislation to curb "revolving-door" lobbying, as when a state legislator or other official leaves public office and immediately sets up a shop lobbying his or her former elected colleagues. Among proposals is to institute a "cooling-off" period of six months or a year, during which a former lawmaker wouldn't be allowed to lobby the Legislature after leaving it.
At the federal level, lobbyists are required to disclose not just their clients, but also outline their range of fees. Also at the federal level, outgoing members of Congress aren't allowed to lobby their former congressional colleagues for one year.
Missouri, like Illinois, doesn't restrict revolving-door lobbying for legislators, nor does it require lobbyists to disclose their fees.
Davis, a longtime Democratic lawmaker from Bethalto, first registered as a lobbyist in January 2005, the month after his December 2004 resignation from the Legislature. His subsequent lobbying contracts have included work for private entities like ComEd and AT&T, as well as Madison County Transit and the Madison County Regional Office of Education, both of which are public entities.
The Office of Education provides support services to 13 Madison County school districts. The office pays Davis $1,000 a month to be its eyes and ears in Springfield, alerting district officials about legislative issues that could affect them and talking with his former colleagues in the General Assembly.
"The state representatives that represent our region are great people," but can't realistically be expected to keep up with every issue facing schools in Madison County, said Robert Daiber, who heads the Edwardsville-based Office of Education.
He credits Davis for helping convince lawmakers to maintain hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of state special-education funding that had been slated to end. "That's well-invested money" in the lobbying contract, Daiber said.
Davis on Monday questioned the point of proposed waiting periods on ex-legislators before they could become lobbyists.
"I was extra careful about not talking to anybody about lobbying until after I quit (the Legislature)," said Davis, who noted that lining up lobbying business while still in office is already illegal. "If somebody's going to be corrupt, they're going to be corrupt."