No Lobbyists Appear on Influence Brokers’ List : TINCUP: Professionals who know the law know how to keep from becoming officially registered.

The official roll call of the dozen Orange County “influence brokers” turns up a surprising bunch of names: On the April list, for instance, there are a couple of architects, a land-planning expert or two, a few civil engineers and a public relations firm.

They hardly seem like the kind of folks who would have extraordinary influence over county officials or who could make much of a living by peddling it to clients.

“I had stood up and made a presentation to the Planning Commission for a client, Costain Homes,” said influence broker Les Card, a civil engineer who works for Irvine-based LSA Associates Inc. “It never dawned on me at the time that I was doing something that would get me labeled an ‘influence broker.’ ”

Meanwhile, the names that don’t appear are equally interesting: Frank Michelena, a top-notch Orange County lobbyist, is not listed. Nor is lobbyist Brion May, who does a healthy share of county work. Nor is Lyle A. Overby, a former supervisor’s aide who has represented many clients seeking county business.

In fact, of the 12 people identified by the county clerk as influence brokers in April, not one is a professional lobbyist.

Thus Orange County finds itself with a “county-influence broker” law that registers engineers and architects but misses lobbyists, who know the law better and therefore are careful not to get themselves on the list--because that could limit their effectiveness.

That has prompted some campaign experts to suggest that Orange County needs a better system of tracking influence. The current law, they say, is too easy to circumvent and has let lobbyists skate free.

Under the county campaign reform law known as TINCUP, an influence broker is anyone who contributes more than $468 during a 12-month period to all members of the Board of Supervisors and who is paid to communicate to the Planning Commission, the supervisors or their staffs. Once designated an influence broker, that person must disclose his or her clients and must not give more than $972 to all five board members combined within a one-year period.

“TINCUP has not been effective in restricting the influence of ‘County Influence Brokers,’ ” officials with the California Commission on Campaign Financing wrote in a 1989 examination of local campaign laws across California.

“Orange County lobbyists have not gone away,” the commission adds, in a report called “Money and Politics in the Golden State.” “They simply have changed their practices to avoid registering. They are reluctant to disclose their clients.”

The commission recommends that anyone who lobbies “regularly and substantially” be required to register with the county.

Former Orange County Planning Commissioner Shirley Grindle, who led the drive to pass TINCUP, agrees in part. “If I had it to do over again, we would require that all persons acting as agents be registered somehow,” she said. “I wish we had that requirement.”

But Grindle adds that the influence-broker section of TINCUP has succeeded in other ways. Lobbyists who once made large personal contributions--Michelena, for instance--now do not. And the engineers, architects and land planners who appear before the Planning Commission on behalf of clients now have some protection from contribution-hungry supervisors who might otherwise see them as easy campaign bait.

“Before TINCUP, those guys got leaned on by the board continuously to buy tickets to their fund-raisers,” Grindle said. “Now they can say: ‘Hey, I already gave to the limit.’ ”

That’s the case for Card, whose $1,000 contribution to Supervisor Thomas F. Riley put him over the limit and required him to register as an influence broker in the first place. Card has filed to terminate his influence-broker status, but until Nov. 30, he is prohibited by law from making any more contributions to any supervisors.

“That’s fine with me,” he said. “I don’t mind giving, but I want to stay within the law.”

HOW THIS INVESTIGATION WAS CONDUCTED

Figures for this Dollar Politics series were developed during a four-month Times Orange County Edition investigation that used a computer to categorize 14 years of contributions to candidates for the Orange County Board of Supervisors. The period was selected to begin just before the county’s political reform law, TINCUP, was passed in 1978.

Using disclosure statements that candidates are required to file with the Orange County registrar of voters, the study identified 19,150 contributions made to either challengers or incumbents from all sources, including individuals, corporations, political action committees and other groups. Candidates are required to itemize contributions of $100 or more.

The information was edited to correct typographical errors, remove duplicate entries and confirm links between related organizations and contributors that had gone by different names during the study period. Where any links were unclear, those contributions were not categorized, so in some cases the findings are deliberately understated.

The results have also been checked against other government-maintained data, including the registrar’s separate list of major campaign contributors and the state’s list of registered political action committees. The computer research was performed by staff writer Mark Landsbaum, while staff writer Jim Newton reported and wrote the stories.