Letter from Sacramento: Disclosing Dirty Donations

In Sacramento, at restaurants and cafes on the streets that surround the Capitol Building, there are times of the year when you can buy a breakfast of bacon and eggs for $1,200 or mingle at an evening reception and eat a few bite-size bruschetta for $1,500. Or more.

The people spending the money aren’t actually there to eat or drink. They are there to solidify access to legislators and other elected officials for themselves or their organizations or clients.

Today, with COVID, the events have moved online, but the idea is the same: spending money to buy access.

Jesse Unruh, now long gone but once famous for his political power in California, has been often quoted as saying that politicians shouldn’t take special interest money unless they have the independence to vote against special interest wishes. He said it much more colorfully, though.

Some politicians abide by Unruh’s admonition. But too many don’t.

This week we launch a project by our advocate Daniel Barad called “Tracking the Dirty Dollars.” The project is basically a disclosure effort to help people see how much the fossil fuel industry and its allies are contributing to legislators and the Governor.

The information is gathered through the Secretary of State’s very helpful Power Search search engine. That search engine has dramatically improved the ease with which anyone can see where their legislator collects campaign funds. But there are some tricky elements to the engine. For instance, it takes a bit of digging to determine that the oil industry is one of the big givers to a number of benign-sounding political action committees.

Daniel has done that digging and in the data sheets at the heart of the project, and that cover 2019 through November 20, 2020, he has included a page that identifies to which PACs oil and gas interests have committed money.

As explained in the short paper accompanying the data sheets, for this first report, we’ve only examined donations to 30 legislators. Most of those are legislators who fall under the category of “Mod Dems” at the Capitol. These are Democrats who generally are difficult to persuade to vote with the environment, especially if the votes counter the interests of oil and gas or their allies.

We have also included the Speaker and the Senate President Pro Tem, who do not fit into the Mod Dem category, but who, because of their roles, have an outsized influence on what bills move and what bills die.

Finally, we’ve included the Governor. After all, he’s the one who vetoes or signs bills.

In future reports, which we expect to release quarterly, we’ll include additional legislators.

So what did we find in this first effort?

Well, a lot of money--about $2.1 million--flowed from oil and gas interests and their allies directly to the legislators whose receipts we analyzed. This doesn’t include the millions that the oil and gas industry spent on lobbyists and advertising to influence legislation.

Among the top recipients are assembly members Jim Cooper, Patrick O’Donnell and Tom Daly. Each received more than $100,000 in direct donations and Cooper was the beneficiary of nearly $100,000 in independent campaign expenditures by oil-industry supported political action committees for his re-election.

The timing of the flow of contributions to legislators' coffers was also often provocative.

For instance, in August, Senator Bob Hertzberg belittled environmental justice advocates in front of a small in-person audience that included oil lobbyists and trade union lobbyists representing two union groups associated with the oil and gas industry. Hertzberg effectively killed a bill, Assembly Bill 345, that the labor and oil lobbyists were opposing that would have ensured that health-protective setbacks from new oil wells are considered in an agency rulemaking.

In October and November, the two labor organizations that the lobbyists in the audience represented--the State Building and Construction Trades Council and the Southern California Pipe Trades Council--gave a total of $59,200 to Hertzberg’s campaign fund for his run for State Controller. That amounts to 84% of all the dirty dollars we counted in that fund in 2019 and 2020.

Could there be a link between those donations and that work Hertzberg did to kill AB 345? Only Hertzberg and the unions know for sure.

Through 2019 and until the wee hours of the last night of session in August 2020, environmentalists around the state pressed for the legislature to pass bills that would reduce plastic packaging. The bills, AB 1080 and Senate Bill 54, got so close to passage. But then SB 54 failed on the assembly floor, and AB 1080, which passed in the senate was never sent to the assembly for concurrence.

The oil industry has a vested interest in plastics. Not only is oil a key component in plastics manufacture, the industry has also been investing its own resources in plastics manufacture.

Environmental lobbyists worked to try to get a vote for the plastics bill from Assemblymember Bill Quirk, calling on his constituents to make direct contact with him to push for a vote for SB 54 in August. In the end, he refused.

In June, he received a $2,000 donation from Dart Industries, the leading plastics packaging manufacturer. In October, he received another $2,000 from Dart and $1,000 from the American Chemistry Council, an opponent of the plastics bills. These are relatively tiny amounts within Quirk's whole fundraising total, but the timing is interesting. Also, it's noteworthy that Quirk, who prides himself on his knowledge about climate change, received more than $71,000 from oil and gas interests and allies during the period we researched.

Here’s the thing: Money buys access and access is the coin of the realm in lobbying bills. The oil industry and its allies give a lot of money to people who don’t usually vote to cut or eliminate the oil industry’s deadly impacts on our planet.

We invite you to review the data sheets and the cover report. If your legislator was one of the ones covered in this report, note how much he or she received from oil-and-gas-related donors. Then watch for future reports to see if disclosure will help at least some elected leaders to reject dirty dollars.

Sincerely,