Janine Jackson interviewed Nicholas Kusnetz about state government accountability for the November 13 CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
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Janine Jackson: As disaffection with federal government grows, people look more to state governments to make change in their lives. State governments are generally believed to be less removed and more responsive to regular people.
If you want to keep believing that, you should on no account read the latest State Integrity Investigation from the Center for Public Integrity and Global Integrity. It grades state governments on criteria including electoral oversight, legislation accountability, lobbying disclosure and public access to information, and the results are not good.
Here to explain the findings and their meaning is Nicholas Kusnetz, project manager and reporter at the Center for Public Integrity. He joins us by phone from DC. Welcome to CounterSpin, Nicholas Kusnetz.
Nicholas Kusnetz: Hi, thanks for having me.
JJ: What, first of all, does the State Integrity Investigation seek to measure?
NK: The project is measuring the systems that states have in place that are really meant to deter corruption, or catch it when it occurs. So we’re looking at accountability and transparency measures, both at the laws and at how those laws are implemented and enforced.
JJ: So it’s not really a list of incidents of corruption; it’s about the systems that are there to deal with it.
NK: That’s right; it’s not a measure of corruption. The last-place state, which is Michigan–we’re not saying Michigan is the most corrupt, or that first-place Alaska is the least corrupt. It gets into the funding of ethics agencies, and whether or not records requests are actually accepted and supplied in a timely fashion and without citizens having to pay exorbitant fees.
JJ: So there are variations among states on several vectors, but overall the results were–I think “terrible” would be an appropriate word. I mean, broadly speaking, is it that laws exist about things like conflicts of interests, but they are flouted? What’s going on, and what are some of the examples that illustrate the problem?
NK: It’s a combination of those, but I think one area to look at this is public access to information, which is one of the categories that we looked at. And that’s really looking at open records laws, open meetings laws. And that was actually the worst performing category, so 44 states got failing grades there. And what you see there are that open records laws in most states have just been riddled with exemptions that have been sort of tacked on over the years.
But more than that, it is the application. Agencies will deny requests without much explanation of why, or they will delay requests, or charge, as I said, huge fees. And when that happens, citizens really have little recourse other than going to the courts, which obviously is an expensive, time-consuming process. There’s no entities, for the most part, that are meant to oversee these laws. There are a few exceptions; Iowa has one of those bodies that are meant to mediate disputes, so that’s an example.
So you see the same thing in ethics enforcement, where you may have an agency or combination of agencies, but, for the most part, they don’t receive the funding they need to do their jobs. They don’t necessarily have all the authority to issue sanctions and to have real teeth.
JJ: And if people think, well, it’s just state governments, it’s kind of small potatoes, that’s just not true, is it?
NK: Exactly. You mention that partisan gridlock in DC has made people turn more to local and state governments for solutions. And it’s tons of money, more than a trillion dollars, nearly $2 trillion that state governments are collecting and disbursing every year. And they’re passing thousands of laws, and in many ways state government really has a greater impact on people’s everyday lives than DC.
JJ: And you talk about public access, or open access to information, and that seems to cut to the core of democratic participation. I mean, before you can even push for anything or reform anything, you have to know what is going on.
NK: Yeah, that’s right. And I think another common theme throughout many states–most states have part-time legislatures, so you have lawmakers that for some or even most of the time are doctors, lawyers, farmers, and they have their own private interests as well. Now, a lot of states value this setup. They say that this brings real-world experience; it’s not professional politicians.
And there’s truth to that, but it also brings the potential for conflicts of interest. For example, in Missouri, you have a lawmaker who introduced a bill to prohibit cities from banning plastic bags at grocery stores. It turns out that he is also the director of the state grocery association. And, now, that’s no secret, but it presents an obvious conflict of interest, and that’s just one of many examples, both in Missouri and in many states.
JJ: One of my favorites, if you will, was Idaho, which has a $50 cap on gifts to lawmakers; it has this law or this policy. But a lobbyist was able to spend more than $2,000 hosting a state senator and his wife at a golf tournament, and it was OK because the money wasn’t spent in return for action on a particular bill. It sounds as though, if you can’t point to a specific quid-pro-quo that is labeled as such, it’s OK to just be kind of steeped in influence. It sounds like it’s just such a culture of conflict that it’s hard to cite a particular incident.
NK: That’s right, a sort of a common bar, when you look at lawmakers, and this is just a theoretical situation, it’s fine for a car dealer to introduce a bill that has to do with the taxes on car dealerships as long as it doesn’t just affect his car dealerships; if it’s industry-wide, many states wouldn’t view that as a conflict.
JJ: But I think many citizens absolutely would.
NK: Exactly.
JJ: Well, I remember back in 1998 a story in American Journalism Review called “Missing the Story at the State House.” It was about the decline in statehouse reporting that accompanied the consolidation of the newspaper industry, and a Detroit News reporter, Jim Mitzelfeld, told how state coverage was falling victim to cost cutting, in this case by Gannett, and that he was being told to do stories that were super short, six to eight inches. And when he argued that it took more space to tell both sides of a complex issue, he said, “They’d say, ‘We don’t have room for both sides, pick one side.'” I always remember that example.
But ideally, journalism could play a role here in taking up some of the slack of the watchdog agencies. What gets in the way of that?
NK: That is the role that journalists should be playing, and that’s why we did the report. Unfortunately, you have cuts across the country to statehouse reporting, newspapers just having to cut staff, and so there isn’t that presence that there used to be. There aren’t as many eyes in statehouses watching legislation, and that’s part of why we did the project, is to help provide this information to citizens and also to journalists.
JJ: States did do pretty well on some counts; what were those, briefly?
NK: There are two categories in particular where states scored pretty well: on the budget process, whether citizens have access to the budget process, whether they have input, whether there are adequate checks and balances. And a majority of states actually got B’s or better there. Another category is internal auditing; for the most part, states have pretty good systems in place to look at their own books and to make sure that agencies are not wasting money. These are important aspects of their operation that there is good news on.
JJ: This is the second time that you’ve done this, what’s the trajectory? Are things in general terms getting better or getting worse do you find?
NK: First of all, the scores are not directly comparable. We did a number of changes to the project, to improve it, to make it more rigorous. For example, we got rid of two categories; redistricting, for example, takes place once every ten years, so we didn’t want to do that again. And we also added some questions here and there to address evolving issues, like independent campaign spending. That said, there has seemed to be a trend in a number of states towards increasing secrecy. There have been reforms here and there, but the public records laws are getting older, and as that happens exemptions seem to be tacked on, and agencies increasingly tend to use them, rather than to provide records, but to block records.
JJ: Finally, one of your sources that works on state ethical issues had, I think a very, maybe even the take-away comment, which was, “It’s very, very difficult for legislatures to focus on these things and improve them because they don’t want these laws, they don’t want to enforce them and they don’t want to fund the people enforcing them.” It really sounds like a system where lots of folks are benefitting, except for regular citizens.
NK: There is definitely some difficult incentives built into it, when you have people responsible for creating the laws that are going to oversee themselves. There isn’t a lot of momentum often to make changes; generally you don’t see big changes happening, with rare exception, without major scandals. You saw that in Virginia with former Gov. Robert McDonald being convicted; they passed some laws, which advocates have said are somewhat limited, but nonetheless they passed some real reform measures there on gifts, and creating an ethics commission there. But often it takes a big scandal.
JJ: And I guess that kind of brings us back to journalists, because it’s often reporters who do the digging that brings those things to light. So that’s part of the reason, as you’ve said, that you hope journalists will not just read this, but take it up and use it, right? Use it and carry this story forward.
NK: We want to bring these issues to light, and we also want this to be a resource for people, for reporters across the country.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Nicholas Kusnetz of the Center for Public Integrity. You can check your state’s report card on the State Integrity Investigation at their website, PublicIntegrity.org. Nicholas Kusnetz, thank you very much for joining us on CounterSpin.
NK: My pleasure; thanks for having me.
