Council Panel OKs Lobbying Revisions : Ethics: Committee agrees to changes in law regulating contact with city officials. Neighborhood and small nonprofit groups would be exempted, but fuller disclosure would be required of lawyers.

A long-delayed revision of a law regulating lobbyists at Los Angeles City Hall moved out of a City Council committee on Thursday, with provisions designed to make more lawyers reveal their official contacts with city officials.

The council’s Rules and Elections Committee agreed to allow substantial amendments to the 27-year-old law so that neighborhood organizations and small nonprofit groups generally would be freed from reporting lobbying efforts; most professional lobbyists would still be required to file quarterly reports.

If approved by the council next month, the changes would reduce by about half the number of people reporting their contacts at City Hall, while attempting to more fully reveal the lobbying activities of lawyers.

Many attorneys have refused to report lobbying activities and the amounts they were paid, as required under the ethics law. The lawyers, such as former City Councilman Art Snyder, contend that such reports would violate their private relationships with clients.

The amendments approved by the council committee seek to obtain fuller disclosure of lobbying by attorneys by requiring that they and their clients file quarterly reports with the city Ethics Commission. Currently, the clients are not required to file.

The commission has used the reports to make detailed analyses of City Hall issues. In reports released four times a year, the commission then describes how much companies and special-interest groups have paid to influence decisions.

The mere emergence of the ordinance from the committee, where it had been bottled up for more than a year, was considered an important development by members of the city’s Ethics Commission.

“This is a major step forward,” said Ed Guthman, an ethics commissioner. “It’s going to free up a lot of people (from reporting) who didn’t get paid anything or who made just a couple of visits to City Hall. And it’s going to focus on the powerful, highly paid lobbyists.”

The amendments approved by the committee also would, for the first time, permit the Ethics Commission to conduct audits when it believes that lobbying reports are inaccurate.

The City Council committee recommended watering down two other provisions of the law that had been proposed by the ethics panel. Council and committee members Richard Alatorre and John Ferraro recommended that lobbyists only be required to file reports if they are paid more than $4,000 a quarter for their work. The Ethics Commission had suggested that the threshold be set lower, at more than $3,000 a quarter.

The committee’s proposed threshold would have allowed several well-known lobbyists--including former City Atty. Burt Pines and former Deputy Mayor Tom Houston--to avoid filing reports in the most recent quarter, according to Ethics Commission staff.

The committee also rejected an Ethics Commission recommendation that lobbyists be required to report when they give elected officials tickets to charitable and other events. The Ethics Commission said tickets can be used to gain access and influence but council members said such gifts are inconsequential.