How can state officials levy a six-figure fine on a legislative lobbyist - a punishment presumably intended to encourage open, honest government - but keep the public in the dark about what was going on?
That's the $64,000 question posed by a whopping $111,000 fine imposed by the Secretary of State's Office on Don Beason, once a hugely influential presence at the General Assembly, whose lobbying career came to a crashing end with the Jim Black scandals in 2007.
The bottom-line answer, which isn't nearly good enough, is that a state law says complaints about lobbyists, and investigative records in such cases, are confidential. "By statute and on advice of counsel, I cannot talk about it," Elaine Marshall, the secretary of state, told The N&O's Benjamin Niolet, who this week reported on Beason's fine.
If that's really the law on lobbying - and even if the law wasn't written by lobbyists, as it would be reasonable to suspect - it ill serves the public interest. Like a baby after a big meal, this thing needs changing.
Just consider the implications of what's alleged here. Niolet reported that Beason and his son Mark are "accused of doing lobbying work while being paid with money funneled by five undisclosed clients through a New Jersey pipefitting company in an effort to mask who was trying to influence lawmakers."
Yet, as things stand, the only reason we know anything about the fine is that Beason is appealing his penalty to the state Office of Administrative Hearings. A little information has trickled out from there.
Mostly, though, it's pure guesswork. How are North Carolinians supposed to weigh Beason's claim that the fine is unmerited when officials disclose next to nothing about what he's accused of? Were the several other parties involved penalized? How does the amount of Beason's fine compare with those in other cases? And what's up with those New Jersey pipefitters, anyhow?
Any way you slice it, this is an unacceptable situation, especially since state government, badly burned by numerous Democratic officials' bad behavior, is supposedly on an openness kick. You'll find precious little of that in the statute on lobbyist investigations, or in the way a key provision has been interpreted.
So, what happened? There seems to be bipartisan agreement, now that the Beason situation has surfaced, that secrecy is excessive and that blame falls on an overly broad "tweak" to the lobbying laws the legislature approved in 2008. This is the part that says complaints of lobbying and investigative records are confidential, to be released only by court order. Leading figures in both parties told Niolet this week that the provision went too far.
Then there's a 2009 legal opinion from a lawyer in the state Attorney General's Office holding that neither Marshall nor the state Ethics Commission could disclose anything about the matter. Marshall (who's running in the Democratic U.S. Senate primary) says she wants to change that. Good, but meantime she might ask Attorney General Roy Cooper whether the 2008 legislative language really must be interpreted as such an ironclad restriction.
To make self-government work, citizens must know who's paying to influence our legislature, and how much. And when lobbying rules are broken, secrecy about the offense and the punishment is the last thing we need.
