LOBBYING AUDIT
Ethics board selects 10 lobbying operations for compliance audits.
Here’s a lottery you might not want to win.
Two Thursdays ago, the Citizen’s Ethics Advisory Board randomly drew the names of 10 companies and groups that have used lobbyists to audit during the coming year for compliance with state law.
The “winners” ranged from corporate giants such as Apple and Walmart to an individually owned insurance consulting outfit in Branford.
These examinations will determine if Capitol lobbyists, and the interest groups that hire them, are obeying state restrictions and filing financial disclosure reports aimed at combating the potential corrupting power of tens of millions of dollars spent each year on influencing Connecticut’s government.
The lobbyist audits have been performed every year for more than a decade. For this latest round, Dena Castricone, the ethics board’s chair, presided on Nov. 21 over the selection — using what was described as a computerized “randomizer” program — of 10 businesses and organizations.
More than $33 million was spent on lobbying in the first six months of 2019 alone, state records show.
The big-money influence game so pervades the Capitol and the executive branch that as of now, nearly 1,000 business and organizations are registered with Connecticut’s Office of State Ethics — the watchdog agency that Castricone’s board oversees — to hire lobbying firms, or to employ in-house lobbyists on their own payrolls, to crawl all over the state House and Senate, and into as many state officials’ offices and ears as they can.
In Hartford, state lawmakers even have to run a “gauntlet” of special interest advocates stationed outside the restrooms in the Capitol, according to a former state senator.
“The lobbyists congregated down there by the men’s room. So we’d see them all the time, especially us old guys,” said longtime state Sen. Tony Guglielmo, R-Stafford, 79, who retired in January after serving 26 years in the upper legislative chamber.
(The paid influencers have to gather in the open lobbies, corridors and stairways of the Capitol — which is where the term “lobbyist” comes from — because they’re barred from walking through the doors into the
House and Senate. Same goes for cordoned-off areas immediately outside both chambers.)
Spending $33 million on lobbying in six months seemed like a lot even to Guglielmo as a longserving ex-senator. “It is a lot of money; that surprised me, to be honest,” he said.
But he also said of Connecticut’s lobbying corps: “I never thought they were the bad guys, or from the evil empire. It was really up to the legislator as to how he or she used the lobbyists. If you don’t want to talk to them, you can ignore them, but if you want to hear the arguments for or against [a bill], they’re pretty good. It’s not like you’re only talking to one side.
“For example, with Uber vs. the taxicabs, if you talk to the Uber lobbyist, the guy from the cab company is going to run right over and [say why Uber is wrong]. They served a purpose, as long as you used them in a way that was good. You could use them to get information, and that’s pretty much what I tried to do.” Guglielmo said lobbyists
know that they can’t tell you an “outright lie” because if they’re found out, nobody will listen anymore.
Hot issues, big money
The more contentious the issue, the more money gets spent on lobbying it, as proved this year by the so-far-fruitless effort to sell the public on Gov. Ned Lamont’s proposals for tolls on Connecticut highways.
This effort showed itself in big way during the 2019 legislative session, from January to June — as a coalition of labor and construction industry groups called Move CT Forward spent more than $700,000 by early May on a pro-tolls public relations campaign, according to filings with the state ethics office.
That spending figure by Move CT Forward has now risen to $925,828, tops for 2019, according to the ethics agency.
The second-highest spender on lobbying this year has been the Connecticut Hospital Association — whose more than 140 members, including hospitals and health care organizations, face a multitude of legislative and regulatory issues — with $719,511.
MGM Resorts International, which runs a casino in Springfield and has sought to build one in Bridgeport, spent $595,641 on lobbying.
And MMCT — the joint venture between the Mohegan and Mashantucket Pequot tribes that wants to build a casino in East Windsor — has spent $587,957, records show.
The fifth-ranking lobbying spender this year has been Eversource, the utility company, with $448,214, according to the ethics agency.
None of those interest groups, by chance, was selected by the ethics board to be among the 10 “client lobbyists” that will undergo audits during the coming year by the ethics office’s deputy enforcement officer, Marc Crayton.
A client lobbyist, under Connecticut’s ethics statutes, is a business or other organization that pays, or agrees to pay, at least $3,000 in any calendar year for lobbying services on its behalf. The person who’s paid to do the actual lobbying is called a “communicator lobbyist.” In the audits that Crayton performs, both the “client” and “communicator” lobbyists are scrutinized.
‘Winners’ of the drawing
Below is a list of the 10 client lobbyists selected on Nov. 21 by Castricone and Crayton, using the computerized randomizer, from the pool of those who were registered at any time during the two-year audit period from Jan. 1, 2017 through Dec. 31, 2019.
They and their paid “communicator lobbyists” — who, of course, include prominent names who left government posts for lucrative gigs in which they lobby officials they know from politics and PAC fundraisers — will be audited in the order decreed by the randomizer. They are:
CSC Holdings LLC, holding company for Cablevision of Connecticut franchises that provide cable TV and internet services. It is halfway through a $360,000 ($15,000 a month), two-year lobbying arrangement with Brown Rudnick Government Relations Strategies, the firm of veteran lawyer-lobbyist Thomas Ritter, former Democratic speaker of the House at the state Capitol.
AFCO AvPORTS Management LLC, which operates Tweed New Haven Airport under a city contract. It entered a $12,000 ($4,000 a month) lobbying deal Oct. 1 with Roy & Leroy, the firm of longtime Capitol lobbyist Craig Leroy. The contract runs through Dec. 31.
Seanco LLC, the insurance consulting business of Sean Rabinowitz of Branford. He had a $30,000 arrangement running from Jan. 1 to July 8 this year with Sullivan & LeShane — the firm of veteran lobbyists Pat Sullivan and Paddi LeShane — to lobby in conjunction with the Connecticut Brewers Guild to change state insurance regulations so the brewers could create their own employee health plan. They were unsuccessful, but Rabinowitz said Wednesday they’ll try again next year.
Apple Inc., the corporate tech giant based in Cupertino, Calif., which is halfway through a $96,000 ($4,000 a month), twoyear lobbying agreement ending Dec. 31, 2020, with the Hartford firm of Powers, Brennan & Griffin.
1st Alliance Lending LLC, an East Hartford mortgage lender that spent the year battling state bank regulators’ efforts to revoke its license after previously receiving financial aid from the Department of Economic and Community Development. It entered a $30,000 ($5,000 a month) agreement from January to June for lobbying by the Hartford office of Global Strategy Group — where lobbyist Roy Occhiogrosso, former campaign strategist for former Democratic Gov. Dannel Malloy and later a top aide in Malloy’s office, is a managing director.
Walmart Inc., which is halfway through a two-year, $58,494 agreement ending Dec. 31, 2020, with the New Britain-based lobbying firm Gaffney, Bennett & Associates, whose co-founder and managing partner is the veteran political activist Jay Malcynsky. He managed campaigns for former Republican members of Congress and was campaign manager for Bush for President in Connecticut in 2000.
The Connecticut Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects, which has a $26,000, two-year arrangement ending Dec. 31, 2020, with TCORS Capitol Group LLC, a Glastonbury-based lobbying and government relations firm.
CleanSlate Centers Inc., whose national system of substance abuse treatment centers includes one in Hartford. It has a $38,286 agreement for lobbying services during 2019 with Rocky Hill-based Kozak & Salina, whose partners are David Kozak and Adam Salina.
Cornell Scott-Hill Health Center, which has more than 20 community health service sites throughout New Haven County. It has a $42,000 ($3,500 a month) agreement with Kozak & Salina for lobbying services in 2019.
The Connecticut Association for the Performing Arts, which has a $22,000 expense-reimbursement arrangement with Gaffney, Bennett & Associates for the two years from Jan. 1, 2019, to Dec. 31, 2020.
“Connecticut’s lobbying laws are in place to prevent corruption and provide transparency by showing the citizens of the state who is spending money on lobbying, what issues are being targeted and how the money is being spent,” the Office of State Ethics, headed by Executive Director Peter Lewandowski, said in announcing the upcoming audits.
“[B]ased on our current lobbyist registrations, there are 996 registered client lobbyists, 510 in-house communicators and 214 individual communicators,” the statement said.
If an audit finds that a lobbyist or his or her client ran afoul of state lobbying regulations, do they get fined? No one has been so far, said Nancy Nicolescu, director of education and communications for the ethics office.
Instead, those who have failed to meet filing deadlines for reports, or who have failed to report spending “in furtherance of lobbying,” for example, must submit to “corrective action plans,” Nicolescu said. Those plans require the lobbyists to correct their filings. “We don’t take enforcement actions unless they don’t comply with their [corrective] plans,” she said.
When the ethics office began its audit program, it did 40 of them annually. But years of state budget cuts have reduced the number by three-quarters. Those cuts have been imposed by legislators and governors who aren’t fond of scrutiny by the government watchdogs, despite their rhetorical tributes to the integrity of Connecticut government.
Lewandowski, the new ethics director named in July, is hoping to get enough funds in his budget to hire an account examiner. Whether he’ll succeed is something even the randomizer can’t determine.