Ethics Cops Always Get Their Nun--and That’s a Problem

When most people think of a lobbyist, they visualize a flashy, glad-handing, free-spending kind of person, buying drinks and dinners for pols and dispensing campaign contributions to get favorable treatment for clients.

Certainly nobody’s vision of a lobbyist would be a nun in the plain skirt, blouse and sweater of the Sisters of Social Service, who spends her days in the streets of South-Central Los Angeles working to obtain better housing for the poor.

That is why Sister Diane Donoghue, executive director of the nonprofit Esperanza Community Housing Corp., was surprised to receive a letter from the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission proclaiming in bold type:

“This letter is to inform you that you may be subject to the city’s lobbyist registration requirement. City law requires you to respond to this notice within 15 days of the date noted above.”

Sister Diane having to register as a lobbyist? Hard to believe. That was my reaction when I was told of the letter recently by another woman also active in the low-cost housing cause, Jan Breidenbach, executive director of the Southern California Assn. of Non-Profit Housing. Breidenbach had received an identical letter.

As I inquired into the affair, I learned the letter was a defective product of City Hall’s bureaucratic thinking and of a city lobby-control law that imposes unfair burdens on little guys while permitting powerful lobbyists to escape regulation.

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The law, requiring lobbyists to pay a $35 registration fee and file quarterly reports on incomes and expenses, was passed in 1967. It was supposed to reveal the names and financial resources of the powerful back-room lobbyists who shape city policies. These men and women earn their livings by guiding businesses through the regulatory maze and influencing legislation affecting them.

But the City Council, hostile to reform, made the ordinance so broad, so all-encompassing, that it was unenforceable. There could be hundreds or thousands of so-called lobbyists under its definition, far too many to regulate and prosecute.

The ordinance says you’re a lobbyist if, “for pay or other consideration,” you testify or write or speak to a city official to influence action on legislation.

Think about the implications. Say you are a restaurant manager who testified against the city’s anti-smoking ordinance. Under the law, you could be considered a lobbyist.

You might also find yourself branded as a lobbyist if you are an official of an anti-abortion organization who is reimbursed for parking and mileage for driving to City Hall to fight for your cause.

I suppose that if I loaded a bunch of kids into a van, drove them to City Hall so they could ask for more money for playgrounds and then later treated the gang to Big Macs, they’d be considered lobbyists. A Big Mac certainly fits into what the ordinance calls a “consideration.”

The law was so stupid that it was ignored for 20 years. But in 1991, voters, unhappy with City Hall’s ethical standards, approved a law creating the City Ethics Commission to oversee lobbying, campaign financing and government ethics. The new ethics cops were given the job of enforcing the old law.

Unsuccessful in its attempt to get the council to pass a more practical lobby-control law, the Ethics Commission embarked on a scorched-earth enforcement of the old one. Obviously, the ethics cops have been trying to make a point about the law’s shortcomings. It’s an old trick that bureaucrats practice to get their way. Sister Diane got caught in the net.

She, Breidenbach and others are considered lobbyists because they appeared before the City Council last August to oppose Mayor Richard Riordan’s plan to sell the Downtown public library to a Philip Morris subsidiary. They protested that the complicated financial features of the deal would end up reducing city funds now used to help build low-cost housing.

When she received the Ethics Commission letter, Sister Diane replied that she was not a lobbyist. “We do not act on behalf of individual clients but rather represent those persons who are economically disadvantaged and have need for decent affordable housing,” she wrote.

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I asked Benjamin Bycel, executive director of the Ethics Commission, why his cops were pursuing Sister Diane. He replied the law required it. “We have to be even-handed,” he said.

The solution, he said, is to change the law. “For the last three years, the Ethics Commission has been working to junk the dinosaur lobbyist law we work under,” he said. For example, the commission proposal would exempt anyone earning less than $12,000 a year for lobbying.

But don’t expect such a sensible solution to pass. Other portions of the Ethics Commission proposal would tighten regulation of those still covered by the law. Powerful lobbyists have used their influence with the council to bottle up the proposal in a committee.

“If they (Sister Diane and the other housing advocates) want changes to happen, they have to talk to the City Council,” said LeeAnn M. Pelham, deputy director for operations. “We are not the enemy.”

Meanwhile, the ethics cops are not exactly in hot pursuit of Sister Diane. And she’s not on the run. “I think they will let it ride,” she said. “I told them I would not pay the registration fee. I am not a lobbyist. That’s dumb.”