Upcoming at Honolulu Weekly: GMO money at the State legislature.

The next installment of my research on who's funding our legislators' campaign races should be appearing this week in Honolulu Weekly. This one deals with agribusiness corporations such as Monsanto and Syngenta, which have heavy investments in both genetically modified crops and our legislators.

I've got a couple more campaign funding articles to spring after that. Nearly completed is a story about tobacco money in the legislature, which is already promised to Big Island Weekly. And then I've got a couple more pieces that I haven't finished researching yet and don't want to reveal until I've asked a few pointed questions of some specific legislators. After that, I'm going to be ready to take a break from the subject for a while. Anybody got something else they want investigated?

Philip Morris's Campaign Generosity; Mufi Hanneman Money Glitch?

I've been continuing my voyage into the wacky, wonderful world of campaign finance. I've got a green light from the Big Island Weekly to do a story about tobacco money in local politics. And yes, local politicians have been calling for Philip Morris quite a lot, but it ain't easy to trace. Unlike, say, Anheuser Busch, which funnels its money through its own non-candidate committee, Philip Morris's money comes in sometimes under its company name, sometimes through its parent company, Altria; sometimes via its wholly owned lobbying subsidiary, Altria Commercial Services, sometimes through local lobbyists that the company hired, and sometimes through company officials. As a result, I'm having to go through every individual candidate's campaign filings to look for all the names....

In the process of doing that, meanwhile, I'm making other interesting discoveries. It's no suprise Honolulu Mayor Mufi Hanneman's contributors include a long list of developers and lobbyists, both mainland and local, for instance--but one collection of entries particularly caught my eye. On June 19, 2007, three different partners in a Washington lobbying firm called The National Group dumped a total of $5,500 dollars into Hanneman's campaign spending fund.

State campaign spending laws limit contributions to $4000 per "person." A "person," for the law's purpose, is "An individual or any general partnership in which the individual belongs." The three lobbying partners' donation looks like a clear violation of the law. But if you're waiting for the Campaign Spending Commission to investigate, don't hold your breath. Last year, I brought a similar situation to their attention: Billy Kenoi's mayoral campaign got a huge influx of cash from various heirs of the Campbell Estate. Most of those contributions came in on the same day, and all of the heirs listed their profession as "entrepreneur" (a term used only by Campbell heirs among Kenoi's contributors--which strongly suggests that they planned their contributions together.

I asked the CSC if they were going to investigate.

"We don't go on fishing expeditions," I was told.

SB 884 passes, but campaign fund safe.

After several delays, Senate Bill 884, which raids several special funds to help with the state's billion-dollar-plus projected deficit, has passed. Among the hardest-hit funds: the Hawaii Tobacco Settlement Fund, which loses $20 million to the general fund; the Housing Finance Revolving fund, also $20 million, and the Wireless Enhanced 911 Fund, out $16 million. A bit of good news: the legislature backed off a proposal to raid the Campaign Elections Fund after getting a letter from the the State Attorney General that said such a raid would probably be unconstitutional. So it looks as if the pilot project for publicly funded council elections on this island will probably move forward as scheduled.

The current version of the bill on display at the legislature's Web site, which I assume is the final version, apparently does not find that there is a specific amount of "excess funds" that can be be taken from the HI 5 beverage container deposit fund. But it does give the legislature the authority to make that determination in the future, and takes that authority away from the State Auditor. So we may see another attempt to raid the HI 5 fund in the next legislative session.

Raid on Elections Fund?

Another last minute maneuver may be underway that could derail Hawai'i County's pilot publicly-funded elections program. The program, passed last year by the state legislature, is designed to ensure that county council candidates who could gather enough signatures and five dollar donations from their constituents could get matching money to counter an opponent who had lots of special interest money. The matching funds were supposed to come from the interest on the state's Campaign Elections Fund, which is running a healthy surplus right now.
Yesterday I got an e-mail alert from Kory Payne of Voter-Owned Hawaii, which had pushed for the original program. It said that House Bill 39, which originally had been about placing a $5 surcharge on various state-collected fees had been gutted and rewritten as a bill to let the state borrow the interest from various special funds--including, presumably the Elections Fund, which is supplied from voluntary donations by taxpayers who check a box on their tax returns for that specific purpose.
The Voter-Owned Elections release explained one possible ramification:

Because Act 244 contains a section that says there must be $3.5 million on September 1 before each election year, citizen advocates believed legislators might try to raid the Hawaii Election Campaign Fund to bring it below that $3.5 million threshold. House bill 39 is now waiting to be scheduled for a final “conference committee” at which both house and senate members will try come to a resolution on the matter.

I pulled up the bill's various versions at www.capitol.hawaii.gov, the state legislature's Web site.
Here's the complete text of the latest version:

A BILL FOR AN ACT
relating to state revenues. BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF HAWAII:
Section 1. The purpose of this Act is to effectuate the title of this Act. SECTION 2. The Hawaii Revised Statutes is amended to conform to the purpose of this Act. SECTION 3. This Act shall take effect upon its approval. INTRODUCED BY: _____________________________

In other words, we don't know what the heck is actually going to go into this bill at this time. But we do know that it's no longer about adding surcharges to various state fees. That language really was deleted.

The bill was amended by the Senate to its current gutted form on April 14--enabling the Senate, perhaps, to say that it had hadn't supported a tax increase, just in time for Tea Party Day--and the amended version was returned to the House, which notified the Senate today, April 17, that the House disagreed with the amendment .

Here's Voter-owned Hawaii's take on what happens next:

Payne believes the decision on how much money to take from the election fund rests in the hands of house and senate leadership. “At the end of the day, the two most powerful politicians in the Capitol decide what to do on issues of large public concern. Senate President Colleen Hanabusa, along with Senator Donna Kim, as well as House Speaker Calvin Say, will have the final say on the matter.” House bill 39 will be decided sometime between now and the final decking deadline on May 1.

For those who wish to make their voices heard on what fills in the blanks, here are Hanabusa's and Say's contact info:

Sen. Colleen Hanabusa
21st Senatorial District
Hawaii State Capitol, Room 409
415 South Beretania Street
Honolulu, HI 96813
Phone 808-586-7793; Fax 808-586-7797
Email senhanabusa@Capitol.hawaii.gov

Rep. Calvin Say
20th Representative District
Hawaii State Capitol, Room 431
415 South Beretania Street
Honolulu, HI 96813
phone 808-586-6100; fax 808-586-6101
e-mail repsay@Capitol.hawaii.gov

Where I've been.

My apologies for the infrequent posts lately. I've been heavily engaged in a little research project. I've been going through the campaign spending reports of local legislators, and making my own annotated versions: figuring out what the acronyms of the various political actions committees stood for, who the individuals worked for, which of them were lobbyists. The results have been pretty eye-opening.

This all stemmed from a couple of requests for stories about the move to delay the start of publicly funded elections in Hawai'i County. The pilot "voter-owned elections" program, passed last year, was to have started in 2010. This year, however, five Hawai'i Island legislators--Robert Herkes, Clift Tsuji, Cindy Evans, Jerry Chang and Mark Nakashima--introduced House Bill 345, which would delay the start of the program until 2014. The measure passed the House, but seemed dead in the Senate until a the Hawaii County Council, with its new majority under J Yoshimoto, voted 6-3 yesterday to support Bill 345, despite all-but-unanimous testimony against the delay. Those supporting the measure cited the possible cost, the possibility that the money alloted for public funding would run out before every candidate who applied was funded, and court challenges to similar measures in other states. Those against the delay argued different figures and different court cases, and wondered why the debate wasn't on how to fix any perceived problems instead of about delaying implementation.

But one thing is certain: some of those who support the delay are doing very well under the current system. They've gotten big contributions from special interests outside their own districts, which gives them a huge advantage against any challengers--an advantage they'd lose if publicly funded elections ever became a reality.

Hence my little project. It was an extremely time-consuming job, but it's going to bear considerable fruit. I'm about to send the first story based on that research off to the www.thehawaiiindependent.com: a report on who's financing those five legislators. And now that I have the data, I'm going to be tracking the money behind various other issues at the legislature, such as genetically modified crops (Clift Tsuji, who wants to prohibit state or county regulation of them, is getting a lot of money from the companies that produce them) and the tobacco tax increase (You'd be surprised about who's getting money from Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds). It's going to be fun.

If somebody out there has some experience with data crunching or spreadsheet programming and wants to help extend this effort to other state legislators, btw, give me a call or drop me a line. It's a big job, but it's something that needed to be done a long time ago.