According to public filings, more than 130 registered lobbyists gave contributions toward 2010 campaigns. Republicans, who control the House and Senate, received about $190,000, while Democrats got almost $155,000. Another $13,000 went to nonpartisan judicial candidates.

Five statewide candidates each have received more than $20,000 in contributions from registered lobbyists, with Lt. Gov. Jari Askins leading the way at more than $36,000. Askins won a narrow victory over Attorney General Drew Edmonds in the Democratic primary for governor. Edmondson received more than $28,000 from registered lobbyists. The contributions from lobbyists, however, are a small share of overall fundraising for those candidates; the Askins and Edmondson campaigns have each raised more than $2 million.

Dear Clients:

The date of our utility company’s planned power outage has changed from Friday, August 20, to Friday, August 27, and I want to let you know immediately.

I sent you an e-mail late on Monday about our office closing this Friday, August 20, due to a planned power outage in our section of the City of Akron. Just today, however, our local electric utility company told us the forced outage will be one week later than originally planned.

Please note: the outage will begin Friday, August 27 at 1 p.m. and last until Sunday. We must shut off all electric-powered devices in our building during this time.

Those of you who use our online compliance information services through our website will not be able to access those services from 1 p.m. on August 27 until Sunday, August 29.

Additionally, this planned blackout will affect our telephone system. If you have routine business to conduct with us over the phone, I ask you call us either before 1 p.m. on Friday, August 27, or beginning at 8 a.m. on Monday, August 30.

If you have an emergency and need to talk to us during this time, please call our main telephone number at 330-761-9960. I will have our main number forwarded to my cell phone and will take your call.

Any e-mails you send to us during the power blackout will go to an outside computer server and will be saved on this server. We will review your e-mails on August 30, and respond to any of your needs.

Once again, I apologize for this inconvenience—and also for having to tell you about it twice. This situation, including the utility’s scheduling of the planned outage, remains beyond our control. If you have questions or concerns, please call us.

Thank you.

Elizabeth Z. Bartz, President and CEO
State and Federal Communications, Inc.

You can directly submit questions for this feature, and we will select those most appropriate and answer them here. Send your questions to: marketing@stateandfed.com.

Q. I attended the annual meeting of the National Conference of State Legislatures. While there, I took a group of legislators from various states to dinner and picked up the tab. Most of the legislators were accompanied by spouses. In those jurisdictions requiring disclosure of this dinner expenditure, must I also disclose the amount spent on the spouse?

A. Almost all states requiring disclosure of food and beverage expenditures incurred on behalf of reportable officials also require disclosure of the amount spent on the official’s spouse or immediate family member. However, there are exceptions.

• In Idaho, the lobbying law does not require disclosure of expenditures for spouses and family members of legislators. However, it is common practice for lobbyists to report such expenditures anyway.

• In Michigan, food and beverage expenditures on behalf of spouses or family members are not reportable. However, travel expenditures greater than $725 on behalf of spouses or family members are reportable.

• In Montana, a principal is not required to report expenditures made on behalf of a spouse or immediate family member of a legislator, public officer, or employee.

• In Rhode Island, expenditures made on behalf of family members are not reportable as lobbyist expenditures, but are reported by elected officials.

• In Vermont, expenditures on behalf of a spouse or immediate family member are not reportable.

(We are always available to answer questions from clients that are specific to your needs, and we encourage you to continue to call or e-mail us with questions about your particular company or organization. As always, we will confidentially and directly provide answers or information you need.) Our replies to your questions are not legal advice. Instead, these replies represent our analysis of laws, rules, and regulations.

The amendment would increase the amounts an individual may contribute to a ward council candidate from $100 to $200 and at-large council and mayoral candidates from $300 to $450. The proposed amendment would also remove campaign finance language currently in the city charter.

If approved, council would have to replace the campaign finance charter provisions with an ordinance within three months time. Finally, council would be required to review campaign finance issues on a biennial basis with provisions made for public hearings as part of the review process.

Akron voters will vote on the proposed campaign finance charter amendment November 2nd.

To our valued clients:

Our office will have to close Friday, August 20, at 1 p.m. and this will affect your computer and telephone access/communications.

Our local electric utility company informed us it needs to do some important work on its main underground service line near our offices. Because of this, the utility will shut off electricity to our part of the City of Akron beginning Friday afternoon, August 20.

We must shut off all electric-powered devices in our building during this time.

Once our office closes August 20 at 1 p.m., those of you who use our online compliance information services through our website will not be able to access those services until Sunday, August 22.

Additionally, this planned blackout will affect our telephone system. If you have routine business to conduct with us over the phone, I ask you call us either before 1 p.m. on Friday, August 20, or beginning Monday, August 23, at 8 a.m.

If you have an emergency and need to talk to us during this time, please call our main telephone number at 330-761-9960. I will have our main number forwarded to my cell phone and will take your call.

Any e-mails you send to us during the power blackout will go to an outside computer server and saved on this server. We will review your e-mails Monday, and respond to any of your needs.

I apologize for this inconvenience, but the situation is beyond our control. If you have any concerns before the planned power outage occurs, please call us.

Elizabeth Z. Bartz, President and CEO
State and Federal Communications, Inc.

The Illinois Secretary of State has mailed invoices for the revised lobbyist registration fee.

According to the Index Department, the invoices were sent on August 10, 2010 and the $300 fee is due on September 9, 2010. This invoice must accompany the payment.

The Connecticut House of Representatives voted to override Governor M. Jodi Rell’s veto of the bill designed to reinstate the public election financing program, which had been previously limited by a federal court decision. The state senate had already voted to override the veto.

The immediate effect of the vote is to provide gubernatorial candidate Dan Malloy with six million dollars from the Citizens’ Election Program, twice as much as he was originally scheduled to receive.

Until now, those interested in finding out how much candidates for regional office had raised and where the money came from had to take a trip to the registrar’s office, pour through paper records, and pay photocopying fees.

Assistant Registrar Michael Vu says the county has earmarked $100,000 for a contract to put the information online. The Registrar plans to have the first batch of disclosures on the site in October.

You can read more about the San Diego County Registrar of Voters at their Web site.

Rule 4.4 continues to bar judicial candidates from personally receiving or soliciting campaign contributions, but, under the revisions announced Wednesday, two new exceptions are available to judicial candidates. First, a judicial candidate may make a general request for campaign contributions when speaking to an audience of twenty or more persons. Second, a judicial candidate may sign letters soliciting campaign contributions if the letters are for distribution by the judicial candidate’s campaign committee and the letters direct contributions are to be sent to the campaign committee and not the judicial candidate.

The Justices voted 4-1 to amend Rule 4.4 with Justice Paul Pfeifer voting no and Chief Justice Eric Brown and Justice Judith Ann Lanzinger not participating as both are on the ballot this November. The Supreme Court’s move took place in response to a U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling which struck down similar rules for judicial candidates in Kentucky.

Here is the text from the announcement on the Ohio Supreme Court Web site:

The amended solicitation rule continues to bar judicial candidates from personally soliciting or receiving campaign contributions, but establishes two new exceptions to the personal solicitation ban. … Those exceptions are:

• “A judicial candidate may make a general request for campaign contributions when speaking to an audience of twenty or more individuals;”
• “A judicial candidate may sign letters soliciting campaign contributions if the letters are for distribution by the judicial candidate’s campaign committee and the letters direct contributions to be sent to the campaign committee and not to the judicial candidate.”

The amendments to Rule 4.4 became effective on August 12, 2010.

Photo of the Ohio Judicial Center.

The Council of Engineering and Scientific Society Executives [CESSE] held its annual meeting in Pittsburgh from July 13 to July 16, 2010. CESSE is a professional society comprised of over 1,200 executives from 165 science and engineering societies, whose combined memberships total approximately four million.  Some of CESSE’s members include the American Association of Artificial Intelligence, the America Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists, and the Society of Critical Care Medicine.

The objective of CESSE is to advance, in the public interest, the arts and sciences of the management of engineering and scientific societies.  Essentially, CESSE is an “association of associations”….and therein lie the unique compliance challenges when it comes to government relations and grassroots activity.

I was invited to speak to those members attending the conference’s general management and public affairs program tracks.  Not only did this include those individuals working in the company’s public affairs department, but also its senior executives.

At the federal level, the biggest concern for the group was compliance with the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 [LDA], as amended by the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007 [HLOGA], along with federal lobbying restrictions by nonprofit organizations.  In particular, I addressed the permissible monetary thresholds for lobbying expenditures by a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization when making an election under Internal Revenue Code Section 501(h).  Group discussion included questions regarding the difference between direct and grassroots communication, both at the state and federal level.  Finally, no discussion about compliance would be complete without addressing the ethical disclosure obligations that accompany the vast array of state and federal gift laws.

Although no ninety minute presentation could ever include an in-depth, detailed discussion of state and federal lobbying regulations, the CESSE group walked away with a very comprehensive and practical overview.  I’d like to take this opportunity to wish CESSE all the best for its 2011 annual meeting in Vancouver!

Photo of Nola Werren and Brad Smith of the American Chemical Society.

I found another Web site where you can easily get lost reading for hours. Get a coffee and some cookies and head to the Oyez Project.

The Oyez Project describes itself as a multimedia archive devoted to the Supreme Court of the United States and its work.

Oyez.org has taken on the ongoing task of digitally hosting the audio recordings from the court. Recordings began in 1955. Many of the recordings previously were tucked away as reel-to-reel tapes in the National Archive. The Oyez Project is working to allow visitors the chance to listen to the recordings online.

You can find a thorough archive of Supreme Court cases ranging from Chisholm v. Georgia in 1793, all the way to Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, and more recent cases, too. They have a tag cloud so you can browse cases by topic, or you can find cases by the year.

If you want a biography of a justice (past or present), the Oyez Project has it. You can even see a Youtube video of Sonia Sotomayor being sworn in as an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

I think the most fun feature of the Oyez Project is the virtual tour of the Supreme Court. From your computer, you can walk up the steps to the bronze doors at the entrance, and then go into the Great Hall, the courtroom, and even the Justice’s chambers! (Justice Ginsburg has a teddy bear on her side table and Justice Breyer has quite a book collection.)

If you have a fast internet connection, each room only takes a moment to load. The images are high resolution and beautiful. Just don’t move your mouse too fast, or you will get dizzy making the room spin around. Yes, I tried it.

What is not on the virtual tour, however, is a different “Highest Court in the Land.” Did you know there is a gym on the top floor of the Supreme Court building that houses a basketball court where justices, clerks, and assorted other players can shoot hoops? Our Research Associate David Dobo alerted me to this great secret.

Be sure not to play while court is in session, though, because that is prohibited!

Here is a fun read from the Los Angeles Times about the basketball court:

“Legal Eagles Tip Off in ‘Highest Court in the Land,” by Gina Holland, Associated Press.

Have fun!

Photo of the sign courtesy of Sharada Jambulapati.

Per the terms of a settlement reached Tuesday, the G.A.B. will not enforce regulations requiring groups who run issue ads to disclose their financing if the ads they paid for aired 30 days before a primary or 60 days before a general election. Now, only advertisements advocating the defeat or election of identified candidates will be regulated in Wisconsin.

U.S. District Judge William M. Conley is expected to approve the settlement ending the litigation on August 11, 2010.

Here is the statement from the G.A.B. Web site.

You can read the Wisconsin Department of Justice stipulation letter to Judge Conley, and the Stipulation and Proposed Order.

For more news: “State agrees to drop new campaign ad rules,” by Patrick Marley in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Photograph taken by Dori

A contentious meeting of the Broward County Commission has resulted in a new code of ethics law for the county. The new law bars county commissioners and family members from accepting lobbyist gifts. It also establishes a new Office of Inspector General.

For more coverage of this breaking news:

“Broward Ethics Reform Passes After Shouting Match,” by Carey Codd at CBS 4.

“Gnashing of teeth, tongue-lashing, and ethics reform,” by Brittany Wallman in the South Florida Sun Sentinel.

Van Hollen explains, per Citizens United, any ban on corporate independent expenditures found in Wisconsin law violates the free speech and association guarantees of the First Amendment. The current prohibition found in Wisconsin law, however, banning the making and acceptance of corporate contributions was not reached by the Supreme Court and so it remains standing. Van Hollen goes on to explain Citizens United did not exclude issue advocacy from the scope of permissible reporting, disclosure, and disclaimer regulations which may be imposed by states like Wisconsin.

Finally, Van Hollen concurred with the recent efforts by the Government Accountability Board to suspend its enforcement of the corporate expenditure prohibition found in state law at Wisconsin Statutes § 11.38 (1)(a)(1) as those provision were clearly reached by the Citizens United decision. Attorney General Van Hollen’s opinion may be found at the Wisconsin Department of Justice’s Web site.

Photo of J.B. Van Hollen by WisPolitics.com on Wikipedia.