Kansas City Star | 02/29/2004 | Gifts, favors flow freely to Missouri politicians

Kansas City Star | 02/29/2004 | Gifts, favors flow freely to Missouri politicians

A Highlight:

Posted on Sun, Feb. 29, 2004



R E L A T E D L I N K S
• Area lawmakers share in lobbyist riches
• Lobbyist gifts: Check what your elected official got



Jefferson City awash in lobbyist largess


Gifts, favors flow freely to Missouri politicians

By KIT WAGAR The Kansas City Star


With the kickoff of the 2002 Super Bowl just hours away, Wayne Crump and Jim Foley found themselves on a corporate jet winging their way toward New Orleans.

It was rarefied air for Crump, a cattle farmer and former sheriff's deputy from Potosi; for Crump's wife, Tiffany; and for Foley, a former pipe fitter and one-time alderman for tiny St. Ann in St. Louis County.

What put them on Monsanto Corp.'s jet with $400 tickets to the Super Bowl were Crump's and Foley's part-time jobs as majority leader and assistant floor leader of the Missouri House of Representatives.

The entire trip — the private flight, food and drink after the game and tickets to see the St. Louis Rams lose on a last-second field goal — was worth $4,136 as reported by two lobbyists who picked up the tab.

The trip, although certainly among the pricier offerings, was just one of hundreds of gifts and favors that lobbyists routinely provide to Missouri's elected officials.

Lobbyists reported spending nearly $2.4 million on Missouri public officials, their families and their staffs from 2001 through 2003. The gifts ranged from free meals, concerts and alcohol to seminars at Harvard, lavish birthday parties, trips to the Kentucky Derby, and New Year's at the Four Seasons lodge for seven lawmakers and their spouses.

Lobbyist gifts to elected officials have been reported to the Missouri Ethics Commission since the mid-1990s. But the records were largely inaccessible to the public until a computerized reporting system went online in January 2001.

With legislative term limits bringing dozens of new legislators to Jefferson City, The Kansas City Star began taking a hard look at how special interests are attempting to influence the latest crop of policy-makers.

By almost any measure, the paper found, Jefferson City is awash in lobbyists' money. And the tide is rising.

The value of lobbyists' gifts rose 28 percent last year, reaching $916,828 — nearly $3,600 every business day of the year. The money flows so freely that many legislators — from freshmen to veterans — have no qualms about asking lobbyists to pay for expensive trips, tickets and receptions for constituent groups.

The average elected official in Missouri received nearly twice as much as their counterparts in Kansas last year. A computer analysis of lobbyist gifts in Missouri over a 31-month period found a trend that tends to undermine the purpose of lobbyist disclosure laws: Spending skyrocketed last year on official groups of lawmakers, which are allowed to accept gifts without them showing up under each recipient's name. The number of such groups doubled last year.

Critics question whether the size and frequency of gifts force lawmakers to choose between two masters — the lobbyists who add an element of fun to the job or the public that voted to put them in office.

Celia Wexler, research director for the government watchdog group Common Cause, said gifts are the means lobbyists use to get the access and influence they need.

“That's why it is so troubling,” Wexler said. “What we want to believe, what we need to believe, is that every vote counts and every constituent counts and no one has a direct line to our state representatives. … But it's human nature to develop warmer feelings for people who are nice to you, and to begin to view lobbyists' opinions more favorably. It creates questions about what arguments lawmakers are listening to and who is whispering in their ears.”