Karen Getman

At a quarter-century old, California’s Political Reform Act has grown flabby, thanks to the extra padding of some 200 amendments that lawmakers and voters have applied to it over the years. Many elected officials, particularly those irked by the volume of paperwork they must fill out to comply with the act, believe the law should be slimmed down.

Enter Karen A. Getman. A Bay Area attorney who navigated nooks of the act for her political clients, Getman has firsthand experience with its frustrating side. At one point, she quit taking new clients with conflict-of-interest questions because the rules had grown so complicated. Today, she is chairwoman of the Fair Political Practices Commission, the state agency established to administer and enforce the 1974 voter-approved initiative known as Proposition 9.

An appointee of Gov. Gray Davis, Getman is keenly aware of the balancing act she must perform. While streamlining forms and disclosure requirements, she must ensure that no corners are cut from the law’s original Watergate-era mission to guard against political quid pro quos, personal financial gain and money laundering. Getman says she is spearheading efforts to simplify the act in order to encourage participation in the political process, not to make life cushy for her former colleagues at political law firms and their client-candidates. She insists it is the little guy contemplating a run for local office who will benefit from an effort to trim the act’s complex paperwork requirements, said to remind some of Internal Revenue Service red tape.

Since her arrival, Getman has handled two of the highest-profile cases to come before the commission in recent years. One, the Chuck Quackenbush scandal, in which the former insurance commissioner used his clout as an elected official to put the squeeze on companies he regulated, represented an ethicist’s worst nightmare. At the request of the state attorney general’s office, the FPPC suspended its Quackenbush inquiry so as not to interfere with the attorney general’s probe. The second case, still alive in the courts, involved Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, who challenged the conflict-of-interest restrictions of the political reform act, the very law he championed in 1974.

Getman’s pet project has been to educate the public about what the FPPC does and how it can facilitate the public’s wider involvement in government. She sought and won from the governor and Legislature an extra allocation in the commission’s budget for this purpose.

A graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School, Getman, 43, began her legal career in Washington as a staff attorney for the Women’s Legal Defense Fund. She grew up in a central Connecticut town, the daughter of a utility-company worker and an accounting clerk, in a household where dinner-table discussions about politics sparked a lasting interest in the topic. She majored in women’s studies and, while in law school, served as editor of the Harvard Women’s Law Journal. She is a single mother of two children, ages 10 and 8. On a recent afternoon, Getman talked in her Sacramento office about her mission as head of the FPPC.

*

Question: How has the FPPC evolved over its 25 years?

Answer: Its mission and purpose, set in statute by Proposition 9, haven’t changed in 25 years. . . . What has changed is the implementation of its principles. Like any organization, we’ve had pendulum swings toward different aspects of our goal. Right now, the emphasis is on getting back to when the agency first came into being and the act was passed. At the heart of it is the campaign-finance disclosure statement, with its very strong intent that we force politicians and people in public office to tell the public what’s happening with their campaign money--where it’s coming from and whether some sort of financial interest will be influencing their actions in office. We are looking at what the people thought they were getting when they voted in Proposition 9. We are trying to balance out some of those pendulum swings and return to the law’s core statement of purposes.

*

Q: How many regulations are there?

A: The Political Reform Act has been amended [so many times] I don’t know if it’s even possible to give an accurate count of the regulations that have been added. In some ways, that’s necessary because we are regulating 1st-Amendment-protected activity, so you have to be precise. But it has also been legislative changes, initiative changes, tiny tweakings here and there that have resulted in enormous changes to reporting schedules.

*

Q: Why is it important to simplify conflict-of-interest rules?

A: Because they affect so many public officials throughout the state. There are tens of thousands of officials who have to file statements of economic interest and who have to worry about whether their decisions may in some way impact their personal financial affairs. The statute itself is remarkably simple. It says that no public official shall participate in, or make, a decision that affects his personal financial interest. But whenever you prevent elected officials from acting, you are disenfranchising the people who voted them into office. So we’ve been juggling that all year. I’m not at all convinced that we’ve done enough. The next step probably would have to be legislation.

*

Q: What kind of legislation?

A: One of the regulations that was really hard for people to understand had to do with when [officials] can vote on something that affected [their] property.

*

Q: Like the case of Mayor Jerry Brown in Oakland, in which he wanted to spearhead redevelopment of an area where he lived?

A: Right. We had this system where you had to go out and measure from your backyard. If you were within 300 feet of property [being developed], there was one rule. If you were between 300 feet and 1,200 feet, there was another. For 1,200 and 2,500 feet, there was another. If your property was an acre in size, there was yet another. We’ve slimmed that down so now there are basically two circles people fall within. It does not, however, address the problem Brown raised, which is: He was elected on the platform of developing the downtown Oakland area. He owns property in that area, which, some would say, makes him an especially effective advocate for redevelopment, but he can’t vote under our rules. That is really the statute that we have to live with. We can’t change that statute.

*

Q: Do you think that is right?

A: I was troubled by the result of that case, although I voted with the rest of the commissioners against allowing Brown [to participate in redevelopment planning]. I do think it’s ironic that the people of Oakland are disenfranchised in that way. It’s particularly ironic because Brown wrote that law and because everybody knows what exactly the conflict is. . . .

*

Q: Brown’s suing to get your decision overturned, right?

A: Yes. The court of appeal will decide the case, and I think that’s the right result. The court can look at broader issues than we as an administrative agency can.

*

Q: Does the fate of Proposition 208, the 1996 campaign-finance-reform act voters approved only to see it get enjoined by a court, trouble you?

A: It’s a shame that the Proposition 208 case has taken this long to resolve. Nobody benefits when a court takes this long. That being said, I’m a firm believer in the constitutional separation of powers and in each branch having an important role to play. And the role of the judicial system, to some extent, has been to test the will of the majority against core constitutional principles that govern the entire nation.

*

Q: What do you foresee when the FPPC tackles streamlining campaign-contribution reporting rules?

A: The landscape of these reporting rules has really changed tremendously in the last 25 years. Campaigns are bigger, and the reporting rules are certainly more complicated. We’ve got technological changes that were never contemplated by the original act, so it’s the right time for the commission to start from scratch to see whether the rules that were developed are what were really intended. And we will fix them accordingly.

*

Q: How will you ensure that the public has a strong say in the process, as well as ease concerns that you aren’t going to go soft on the people you regulate?

A: We simply will not try people in the press. We are not going to try Chuck Quackenbush or anyone else in the press. We’ll do sound investigations and enforcement actions. Having said that, we have the obligation to explain to people what we’re doing, and we’ll publish more basic statistics about what we do. One of the things people don’t realize is that at this point in the year, we’ve already handled twice as many cases as we did last year. [Because of] streamlining and expediting, we are getting more results.

We’ll also [ensure a public say] in the same way we tried to do it with the conflict-of-interest project, which is conducting meetings all throughout the state, targeting issues that people in particular areas have special concerns about. Both sides of the debate have a real interest in this. People who complain that it’s too burdensome to fill out the forms clearly want to see them simplified. People who have a hard time using the information want to see [simplification] done.

One of the things that struck me was that, when Common Cause came out with its report on gambling contributions, it said, literally, that it took them years to put together the information. There’s something wrong there. We’ve got an unbelievably complicated set of reporting requirements, and I don’t know if that’s what people care about. I think what they really care about was how much money was raked in at the fund-raiser and who helped throw it.

*

Q: What are some of the challenges that Internet technology poses for your agency?

A: In a way, the biggest challenge is the fact that we don’t even know what the challenges are. The technology is evolving quicker than we can figure out what the problems are. There are implications to putting people’s personal financial-disclosure statements up on the Internet. It’s an issue both at the federal and state levels. All kinds of people have to file statements of economic interest. Should they really have all that information up on the Internet simply because they hold government jobs?

*

Q: Increasingly, the public sees elected officials engaging in relentless fund-raising, going all the way up to our state’s highest executive office. It’s beginning to look like an atmosphere of anything goes in California. What do you do?

A: We do some serious investigation, in a professional way, that will get stern results at the end, but at the point when it is fully justified. Does the public think there’s too much money in politics or are they worried about the influence that money might have? Poll after poll shows that campaign finance is not high on the list of public concerns. We at the commission are very concerned about the influence of money, in that it does seem to make people more cynical about the political process. The real challenge is how to take the money out of politics on the other end, finding ways to make campaigns less expensive, making it possible to get a message out without it costing so much.

In the recent trial on Proposition 208, I was struck by what former Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis had to say about ways to campaign by getting people, real live people, involved in the ground effort. This would be very interesting to explore, and something that would make sense for this commission to do. The commission can serve as a sounding board to help break that link between money and campaigns.

*

Q: Has California done enough to ensure its officeholders don’t stoop to quid pro quos?

A: Sometimes I think people are too quick to think there is a problem needing a new law or a new regulation. That’s not always the case. We have some very strong laws on the books in California to prevent quid pro quos, to prevent money laundering, to prevent big cash contributions, to prevent contributions to influence an official election. I don’t necessarily think that there is some big gaping hole. I could be wrong. In which case, the FPPC would support efforts to fix it.

*

Q: Were you dismayed at the Legislature’s recent failure to pass a bill limiting insurance companies’ contributions to the state insurance commissioner who regulates them? With the public’s confidence shaken by the Quackenbush scandal, do you think the Legislature will ever be bold enough to take this action?

A: Instead of being a problem, [the Legislature’s failure to pass a bill] was a really good thing. [Lawmakers] said they would look at the legislation again next year, and it seems to me an appropriate thing to do. . . . The Legislature was designed to be a deliberative body that approaches issues with some thought and debate and reaches a bipartisan consensus on what to do. That’s inherently a somewhat slow process. The thought that you would pass legislation before anybody has even completed an investigation into the problem isn’t something I would encourage.

*

Q: You bring to your office experience and expertise as a private attorney. Do you also see yourself evolving and playing the role of a watchdog for the public?

A: I don’t see those two roles as inconsistent. You have to be able to do it all. You have to make sure the laws on the books are something people can understand and follow. And you have to make sure when people don’t follow them, you move in with enforcement action right away. As an attorney in private practice, I educated people to comply with the law. I came to recognize that when people have access to a good help line, good explanatory written material, the probability increases that they’ll follow the law.