Nobody Is Saying It’s Illegal

Anyone for campaign-financing reform?

Over the past five years, Browning-Ferris, a giant waste-disposal firm, has given hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to selected elected officials in the city and county of Los Angeles.

Is there anything wrong with that? In the end, in fact, nothing is wrong with it--and everything. Nothing, because neither the company nor its employees have broken the law--and everything, because elected officials’ reliance on special-interest money to finance their campaigns is one of the things gnawing at the public’s confidence in the honesty of government at all levels.

As The Times reported last week, since 1985 Browning-Ferris has made campaign contributions totaling more than $100,000 to members of the county Board of Supervisors, the Los Angeles City Council and Mayor Tom Bradley. During the same period, lobbyists, lawyers and consultants employed by the firm spread around another $193,610. It would appear that the company is interested in more than good government. If it can persuade city and county authorities to approve expansion of the landfill it operates in Sunshine Canyon above Granada Hills, Browning-Ferris stands to make billions of dollars over the next several decades. Residents of nearby neighborhoods oppose such expansion, not least because it would destroy one of the county’s few remaining native oak forests and extend the life of a dump they claim has produced dust and blowing trash.

Are Browning-Ferris and its employees trying to bribe our elected officials? No, but as one of the company’s consultants said, “There are only so many spots on an elected official’s calendar,” and campaign contributions assure the company it will get one of them. Of course, officials can grant such access and just say no; they do every day. But the voters ought not to be left outside in the corridor wondering what’s going on behind the closed doors of an office they can’t afford to enter.

That is why Los Angeles desperately needs the campaign spending limits and affordable public financing provided in the City of Los Angeles Ethics Act. It will be on the June ballot, and people tired of waiting outside in the cold while the ensconced insiders decide their fate will vote for it.