Charting the River of Money

There’s nothing illegal about paying a lobbyist to try to influence the voting of Los Angeles City Council members. Some City Hall watchers would even argue, cynically, that some council members wouldn’t know how to vote on issues if the lobbyists weren’t there to tell them.

But the public has the right to know who is paying whom, and for what purpose. That is why there is a city law that requires those who are paid to influence legislation to report how much they earned and who paid them. Problem is, there are loopholes in the law. A big one has to do with lawyers.

Lawyers (and at City Hall some of the most active lobbyists happen to be lawyers) argue that they are not legally required to report lobbying activities because of the privacy accorded the attorney-client relationship.

To get around this, the council’s Rules and Elections Committee has suggested that clients who hire lawyer-lobbyists be required to report how much they pay. However, that assumes all companies and individuals would disclose their lobbying activities; they might not, so it would be easier for the City Ethics Commission to enforce a law that focused on the lobbyists, not their many clients.

Treating lawyers different from other lobbyists stems from a 1970 California Supreme Court decision. State law, according to the city’s longtime interpretation, preempts the city from regulating attorneys who represent clients in so-called “quasi-judicial” proceedings, which could be anything from routine zoning board hearings to planning commission meetings.

The upshot, as the City Ethics Commission has pointed out, is that current law often is interpreted as requiring, for example, more public disclosure from Sister Diane Donoghue, a nun who advocates for the poor, than from former Councilman Arthur K. Snyder, a top lawyer-lobbyist with big-money clients.

That makes no sense, especially when you consider some facts released Monday by the Ethics Commission: In 1993 lobbyists reported $5.8 million in fees, and top lobbying interests gave more than $230,000 to candidates seeking public office. Again, all this is legal. But the public has a right to information that would help it sort out who is influencing whom in City Hall.