• In DC, Advisory Neighborhood Commissions (ANCs) must provide the DC Auditor with quarterly financial reports. The DC Auditor audits financial information, maintains a database of the information, and ensures that the reports are in compliance. Sunlight’s own Matt Rumsey thinks they should disclose this information to the public, maintaining, “It would be a small step to also make this information readily available to the public.” Rumsey provides a clear plan for how this could be done: “The press and interested members of the public could then monitor the ANC financial reports and identify mistakes, omissions, and inconsistencies that may have been missed.” Because of their lack of financial report disclosure, it “takes extremely diligent individuals significant effort and time to uncover improper or missing information.” For his entire take, see his post on Greater Greater Washington. 
• Sunland Park, New Mexico recently had a tumultuous mayoral election that ended with a criminal investigation for voting fraud, bribery, and abuse of taxpayer dollars. After the contested election,  the Sun-News filed a public records act request to obtain a list of donors who contributed to the campaign. However, Sunland Park doesn't require campaign finance reports to be filed by candidates. Phil Banks of Common Cause of Southern New Mexico worries that the lack of disclosure will cause elected officials to “take action to advance their contributors' interests.” He maintains, “the obvious thing is just simply the fact that individuals who contribute — especially large amounts of money — to campaigns generally expect some reciprocity as a result. It doesn't necessarily mean there will be favoritism. It leads to the appearance of it being inappropriate, but it's not always." Banks confirmed that Common Cause is forming a Las Cruces-appointed panel to revise its campaign fundraising rules. The city is currently seeking two community members to serve on the panel. For more information, see Diana Alba Soular’s post on Las Cruces Sun News. 

• In January, Torrance County commissioners flirted with an Open Meetings Law violation by trying to pass a resolution banning public recording of their hearings. While this resolution was curbed, they recently introduced a proposal that will make it harder for citizens record hearings. The resolution calls for 24 hours written notice for any recording of meetings, requires cameras to be pointed only at commissioners, and requires citizens who srecord meetings to stay in a  designated area. According to commissioner Lonnie Freyburger, “We were getting interrupted and different things and there was editing being done on the YouTube and we wanted to get a true and accurate recording of what was going on.” The commissioners are discussing making a county record of all hearings available on their website. However,  Gwyneth Doland of the New Mexico Foundation for Open Government  maintains, “... that does not — and should not — preclude the right of members of the public and the media from recording Torrance County commission meetings that are held in a public facility paid for with county taxpayer dollars.” For the whole story, check out Rob Nikolewski’s post on New Mexico Watchdog.
• Gainesville Citizens CARE filed a lawsuit to annul a $3 billion Power Purchase Agreement contract negotiated by Gainesville Regional Utilities  and approved by the Gainesville City Council for a 100 megawatt biomass incinerator proposed by American Renewables. The lawsuit alleges  that “the contract negotiated behind closed doors in violation of the Sunshine Law be declared void and without legal effect.” According to Josh Schlossberg, “changes allegedly made in secret, without public disclosure, include an extension of the contract from 20 to 30 years, a cost increase of 25%, and the removal of a ‘back door out clause’ that would’ve allowed ‘the contract to be cancelled after its last regulatory approval and before the commencement of construction.’” For the whole story, check out his post on No Biomass Burning.

The Washington Post reported yesterday on new lobbyist regulations being proposed by the American League of Lobbyists. According to the report, ALL recommends eliminating the 20 percent loophole for lobbyists for hire. That would mean powerful stealth lobbyists like Tom Daschle, Newt Gingrich and Jon Corzine would have to register. ALL’s proposal would reduce the size of the loophole for in-house lobbyists, but just barely. It would allow lobbyists who work in-house to fly under the radar by claiming they spent less than 15 percent of their time lobbying. Sunlight has been advocating closing the 20 percent loophole for all lobbyists since before it was cool.

Sunlight’s position is simple. If you lobby, and you are paid to lobby, you should register to lobby. Twenty percent, fifteen percent, in house or not, it makes no difference.

Any carve out will be exploited, giving power players a way to hide their activities. Take Chris Dodd. The head of the Motion Picture Association of America is a former powerful senator who undoubtedly has the private numbers of many current members of Congress programmed into his cell phone. He’s not registered now, and there is no reason to think he would register simply because the threshold was lowered from 20 to 15 percent. Yet he has far more access and far more power than I, an outside lobbyist consultant to Sunlight, or the vast majority of lobbyists-for-hire could hope to have. Why give him a pass?

ALL is not the only group with a proposal to reform lobbying. The American Bar Association has a set of recommendations (that includes eliminating the 20 percent loophole, among other things), as of course, does Sunlight. Lobbying reform legislation has been introduced in Congress, and the President continues to talk about the issue. With all of the suggestions, ideas and competing (and overlapping) proposals, the time is ripe for Congress to take the issue of lobbying reform seriously. A start would be to hold hearings so that advocates could fully explain their positions and members of Congress could start to build a record and build a consensus for meaningful reform.

Jack Abramoff left Washington to serve his prison sentence as a primary perpetrator and beneficiary of its culture of corruption. While his fall from influence prompted many reforms that we were eager to see, there is still a system riddled with loopholes and lacking the transparency we desperately need. Now, he's back. Shilling a book to pay off legal debts and line his pockets, Abramoff now wears the fresh cloak of a reformer who calls to clean the pigsty where he once rolled. We welcome him to the good fight, but honestly, it's hard to believe he's serious.

The master of rhetoric will be speaking at Public Citizen later today - we'll be in the audience and watching online. He frequently boasts he had "100 congressmen in his pocket" yet he has not released the documents or named the names.

After my questioning him on this point, Abramoff responded "Having been to prison personally -- hopefully, Ms. Miller hasn't been to prison and most of your readers haven't been and never will go -- but having been to prison, it's very hard for me to put anybody in harm's way, even people I don't like. And that's besides the point anyway. The point is to change the system." Just five days before his refusal to put anybody in harm's way he told TPM “The only thing I’m doing is trying to make available what I know from my experience so that we can fix this.” Unfortunately we continue to see hollow rhetoric. Instead of waiting until your book stops giving milk, why don't you spill some of those magic beans from the files you still have?

The Sunlight Foundation is committed to lobbying reform and exposure of the full system of influence. That's why we have an outstanding FOIA to see who visited Abramoff in prison, hold public meetings discussing the issue and, of course, encourage public markup of our recommendations for lobbying reform.

Today's event at Public Citizen is an opportunity for Abramoff to convince reformers that he's really serious; helping to fix the system by revealing more substantive information about those who participated in his activities. I don't care whether what he reveals is technically legal or not - decades of exposing K Street continues to prove that it's not always what is illegal that is most troubling, but rather what is completely legal.

Unless Abramoff starts answering these tough questions and open up his treasure trove of information anyone who calls themselves a reformer should be very skeptical of this reformer road show.

Make Abramoff prove himself as a reformer rather than just calling himself one.

Image via C-SPAN.

After launching Sunshine Week with yesterday's successful Advisory Committee on Transparency event, it's a good time to reflect on positive transparency developments around the country (as opposed to yesterday's disheartening news).

Among the inspiring stories that we came across recently, Sunlight was particularly struck by the work of a software engineering class at Virginia Tech. As the Washington Post reported, a professor picked up on the students' desire to find their coursework relevant and dedicated a semester to build a mobile app for the university bus system. After a slew of prototypes and some extra funding, the impressive VT Bus Tracker debuted. It's important to note that this application was only possible with a willing and proactive partnership with the bus system operators.

In light of budget shortfalls around the country, many states have yielded to public pressure to open their books and are putting their financial information online. In the past few months both Indiana and New Hampshire launched 'Transparency Portals' that centralize state spending data. These websites have plenty of room for improvement, but the Sunlight Foundation is excited to see the states dip their toe into the growing community of public officials who recognize public information should be online.

Last week we were interested to watch developments in lobbying disclosure at the state level in Georgia. According to an article in the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, the Georgia Government Transparency and Campaign Finance Commission is hoping to vastly expand the definition of a lobbyist and allow e-filing across the board -- both principles the Sunlight Foundation includes in our Real Time Online Lobbying Transparency Act. While the proposals in Georgia are hardly perfect, any serious deliberation of lobbying reform is admirable and the Sunlight Foundation encourages these discussions.

What other rays of sunshine are we missing? Tweet @sunfoundation or use the hashtag #sunchat to join us this Thursday for a special Sunshine Week twitter chat.

The committee room before the full crowd arrived.

The Advisory Committee on Transparency's event earlier today was a huge success and we thank everyone who was able to join us. It was certainly a lively discussion and we will be following up on the many topics discussed. I hope our panelists enjoyed themselves and the audience found the 'Washington's Lobbying Fix' illuminating.

The full video of the event will be on our site shortly or, for those who have some nostalgia for the electronic fireplace, you can watch the event on CSPAN2 tonight at 8:30-10:00. Below are more photos from the event.

Photos by Nicko Margolies

On Friday, August 1, 2008, the Clerk of the House must launch a public database on the Clerk's web site for travel and gift disclosures and personal financial disclosures filed by lawmakers. This action is mandated by the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act.

Earlier this year, under mandate from the same ethics reform bill, the Senate launched a searchable database of travel and gift disclosure forms. Users can also download the entire database in XML format.

By the end of the week, we should be able to see what disclosure looks like on the House's side.