reform

Wonderful piece called Locked out on Beacon Hill from MetroWest political columnist Rick Holmes.

A lot of good sharp stuff about the lack of transparency in the process. Here's just a couple of paragraphs from the middle.

Read the whole thing. 

Democrats on all sides of the building are already spinning. They heard the voters' outrage and made the tough choices. They passed a good budget in the midst of an economic calamity. They stood up to the special interests, bucking the police unions to bring in civilian flaggers and cut Quinn bill benefits.

They took on the state employee unions on health care and pensions, even taking away some perks that fatten the pockets of legislators. Sacred cows are bleeding all over Beacon Hill.

There's truth to their story, but will the public give them credit? Don't bet on it. Most of the reforms are technical corrections: reorganizing transportation agencies, changing benefit formulas, tightening ethics rules. They mostly fix problems that have generated ugly headlines over the last year or so. They aren't institutional reforms; they don't change the game.

Nor are they likely to change public perception, at least not soon. There will always be another loophole for an unethical pol or a public employee to exploit.

There will always be a detail cop drinking coffee when he should be directing traffic. Howie Carr isn't about to stop talking about government hacks.

 

A wide range of paid lobbyists and volunteers from community based organizations paying close attention to the economists' projections at last weeks revenue hearing at Senate Ways and Means, got another piece of news from Senator Marc Pacheco who announced that the Senate intended to debate ethics and lobbying reform legislation on May 14. The day after ther Senate Ways and Means releases it's budget recommendations and one day before amendments are due.

Not unexpected news, since Secretary Bill Galvin had released a much improved lobbyist tracking system that folks were already testing to find themselves and see if the lobbyists they knew were working against them were properly registered. (Yes, a good user-friendly lobbyist search system is critical to campaign planning and implementation.)

The paid lobbyists and volunteer advocates paying attention to this critical reform effort have been tracking carefully what they considered the overly broad "definition" of lobbying that was in the Governors' proposal and had been retained in the House version.

This definition applied to for-profit AND non-profit large and small employers and both had shared with the House Ethics Committee their concerns that if they had to register everyone who had been involved in strategic research and preparing fact sheets the fees would be excessive and the reporting requirements would be burdensome. 

Because we believe that transparency, enabled by user-friendly searchable data bases, is key to encouraging and supporting civic engagement and accountability, we are encouraging ONE Mass network members to talk with their Senator about two things next week.

Lost in today’s news is an important hearing. 1:00.....A Temporary House Committee on Ethics holds a public hearing on Gov. Deval Patrick’s ethics and lobbying reform bill......Room A-1

One of our jobs at ONE Massachusetts is to provide our network members with the information they need to “pay attention” to how our government works and how we pay for it. It’s called informed civic engagement. Yawu Miller will will be testifying today for ONE Mass in support of increased transparency in the budget making process and increased transparency in the registration and reporting requirements for lobbyists.

Why? Because paying attention is a two way street and transparency is the stop light.

Andrea Estes and Matt Viser’s story in today’s Globe speculates that DiMasi’s “relationships contributed to his undoing”.  And they are correct.

There is no excusing the Speaker from not paying attention when his long time friends and supporters offered to pick up some of his personal expenses or offered him gifts, even if it was “perfectly legal”.  He just didn’t think how it would look on the front page of the paper, and how even these perfectly legal activities would further erode the public’s confidence in government.

There is no excusing his long time personal friends for exploiting their friendship with him for their own personal gain as ‘strategists” advising special interests trying to influence public policy.  I doubt they thought for a second how they were betraying the trust of their long time, now very powerful friend.