Gov.’s Deal Ignites Larger Debate

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s recently divulged magazine consulting deal has sparked a broader debate over whether California politicians should be permitted to accept outside jobs and income while in office.

Democratic lawmakers and a government watchdog group said Tuesday they were independently devising proposals that would restrict outside employment by California’s eight statewide elected officials and expand the level of detail about the business arrangements that politicians must reveal.

The issue is persisting even though Schwarzenegger on Friday canceled the contract he had with American Media Inc., the publisher of Muscle & Fitness, Flex and the National Enquirer and the Globe tabloids. The 1 1/2 -year-old contract paid Schwarzenegger at least $1 million annually to advise the publishing company and serve as executive editor for the two bodybuilding magazines.

Under state law, Schwarzenegger was only required to disclose that he received more than $10,000 from the company, while he was actually getting a percentage of its advertising revenue, which comes mainly from companies that market dietary and nutritional supplements. Schwarzenegger has been accused of both a conflict of interest and a betrayal of his pledge to devote all his energies to governing.

State Sen. Jackie Speier (D-Hillsborough), whose bill to prevent high school athletes from using such supplements was vetoed by Schwarzenegger last year, said she plans to propose barring California’s top eight elected officials from holding second jobs.

Also Tuesday, the state Democratic Party pushed ahead in filing a complaint with the state’s elections oversight agency, saying that the governor’s consulting contract violated gift and conflict-of-interest laws. The governor’s office said the complaint lacks merit.

California Common Cause is also devising legislation to ban outside income for those statewide officials -- also called constitutional officers -- who include, along with the governor, the lieutenant governor, controller, treasurer, superintendent of public instruction, attorney general, secretary of state and insurance commissioner. The group’s executive director, Kathay Feng, said several lawmakers are interested in introducing whatever legislation her group drafts.

Common Cause, Speier and Assemblyman Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) all want to require more specificity in reporting of the amount of money that politicians receive from each income source.

“If Californians knew that a constitutional officeholder had a financial interest that was $100,000 or $200,000, that’s one thing, but if it’s $5 million or $10 million, that’s another thing,” Leno said.

However, there is a limit to the precision that can be demanded about income because the state Supreme Court has ruled that forcing elected officials to reveal exact numbers would violate their privacy. Such efforts are a long way from becoming law. With the legislative session ending next month, lawmakers have little time to refine proposals that affect topics of direct interest to them. The Democratic legislative leaders have not shown a driving desire to make changes.

“What you don’t want is a quick reaction, saying this happened therefore we ought to do this,” said Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez (D-Los Angeles). “People need to be thoughtful about how to approach this, and it ought not be personalized.”

Margita Thompson, the governor’s press secretary, indicated that the governor would be receptive to banning outside employment only if it applied to California’s 120 state legislators as well as to him. “If, theoretically, he was willing to talk about it, certainly it would make more sense for it to apply universally,” she said.

There are mixed views about the wisdom of banning outside work, something few states do, even for their governors.

Robert Stern, the president of the Center for Governmental Studies, said the change would be the most important reform that could come out of the magazine incident. “If you’re a congressman you can’t earn outside income; if you’re an L.A. City Council member you can’t,” he said.

Daniel Lowenstein, a UCLA law professor who was the first chairman of the state Fair Political Practices Commission, said there were limits to trying to legislate ethics. “It’s just in the nature of things that we cannot rely entirely on the law,” he said. “We have to rely, ultimately, on the good character of the people we elect or appoint to office.”

Other analysts said limiting income and requiring more disclosure of the nature of a politicians’ assets could dissuade people from entering public office.

Tim Hodson, director of the Center for California Studies at Cal State Sacramento, said the idea of banning outside income was debated in the late 1980s, when he worked as a legislative staffer. He said lawmakers decided against it, believing that it would isolate them from the concerns of their constituents.

“We need to ask the question, ‘Do you really want to have a system where elected officials are not allowed to be part of the community in an economic sense, that they’re not allowed to earn any outside income?’ ” he said.

There is broader agreement about a need for expanding public disclosure requirements. Nationally, California demands more disclosure of lawmakers than do most states, according to an analysis by the Center for Public Integrity, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit.

The center ranked California’s laws for legislators as the sixth best in the nation, but said the state only deserved a ‘C’ grade because the information is not as detailed as it could be and politicians’ disclosures are not available online, as 16 states currently require. Statewide officials in California have the same disclosure requirements as legislators.

But Karen Getman, who was FPPC chairwoman under Democratic Gov. Gray Davis, said that focusing on those requirements misses the broader point.

“For ordinary people, the disclosure laws have been working fine. This is an extraordinary situation, where a man has extraordinary amounts of income,” she said. “Rather than talking about whether the law needs to be changed, somebody should be talking about whether the governor’s moral compass needs to be changed.”

Times staff writers Nancy Vogel and Peter Nicholas contributed to this report.