A Spotlight on Lobbyists : Orange County Grand Jury urges supervisors to reform disclosure laws

Lobbyists never seem to be threatened by unemployment. There is always a proposed law to be supported or opposed, a client hoping for a contract, a politician’s fund-raiser to attend. Now a potential bonanza for lobbyists is shaping up in Orange County, and this illustrates the need for reform.

Orange County’s bankruptcy last December has brought forth many proposals to save money by hiring private companies to do some work now done by government. There is nothing wrong with that if the taxpayer truly benefits, but when a company is bidding for a contract it is likely to use a lobbyist to help win friends and influence people.

The Orange County Grand Jury this month urged the Board of Supervisors to reform the way it awards contracts for county work. One good recommendation was to require private companies seeking county contracts to identify the lobbyists they have hired and to disclose how much they are paying them.

The City of Los Angeles for decades has required that lobbyists identify their employers. The law has been far from perfect, but it beats anything found in Orange County. This year the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission moved to tighten rules for lobbyists and vowed to enforce them strictly. That merits applause.

The role lobbyists have gained in Orange County can be seen in the grand jury’s comment that in the last four years every company winning a county contract for $1 million or more had hired a lobbyist. The grand jury rightly believes that requiring seekers of government jobs to identify the lobbyists on their payrolls, and their salaries, can improve public confidence in the awarding of contracts.

The supervisors drafted such an ordinance two years ago, but did not enact it. They should have. The supervisors did institute a tough ethics law and a ban on nearly all gifts from companies that had done business with the county in the previous 12 months. Those welcome ordinances followed the guilty plea of one supervisor, who has since left the board, to ethics law violations.

Now it is time to shine a spotlight on lobbyists. The public pays the bills and is entitled to know who is influencing its business.