2 years later, little progress on tracking lobbyist spending in Montana

Two years and one legislative session later, the state still lacks a centralized database to track lobbying spending, with no way to determine how many total dollars flooded into Helena during the session or where they were spent — short of the time-consuming process of poring over hundreds of individual documents filed each month.

Those reports accounted for nearly $7 million in spending during the four-month 2021 legislative session, according to data compiled by the Montana State News Bureau.

The past two years did see some progress on the state’s lobbying system. Legislation passed earlier this year cleaned up outdated language in state law, following more than a year of study by a legislative panel during the interim.

And last year, Jeff Mangan, Montana’s Commissioner of Political Practices, oversaw a major upgrade to the state’s electronic reporting system, which had become largely unusable due to a lack of maintenance over the previous decade. Several lobbyists praised the latest upgrades.

“It is light-years ahead of where it was,” said Jessie Luther, with Helena-based consulting firm Taylor Luther Group. Although she added, “I know some folks still struggle with it because it’s not super intuitive.”

But many others continue to file paper reports, which are then scanned in and reside in a separate online database, requiring members of the public to search through both systems to find information on lobbying spending. Discrepancies often emerge among the same reports filed in both systems, including total dollars spent and bills lobbied. And while principals have to report which bills they hired lobbyists to work on, and what positions they took, there’s no way to search either database by bill number to find out who has been pushing for or against a piece of legislation.

Mangan ended his office’s prior practice of typing those hard-copy reports into the electronic database after he took office in 2017.

“Basically, we were being the secretarial pool for the lobbyists,” he said. “The easiest way to make sure everyone files electronically is to mandate it, and that’s something I wanted the Legislature to take a serious look at.”

During the 2019-20 interim, a committee of lawmakers started drafting up a bill to mandate electronic reporting, but ultimately shelfed the idea, citing the system’s state of disrepair at the time. Former Sen. Dee Brown, a Hungry Horse Republican then serving in her final legislative term, suggested during a February 2021 committee meeting that any lawmaker could opt to pick up legislation to mandate it during the 2021 session if the electronic system got fixed, but none did.

Along with Mangan, multiple lobbyists have also backed the idea of a centralizing their reports.

“It made it frustrating if I was trying to figure out who was working on a bill, and I could tell someone was working on it, and I didn’t know who it was,” Rhonda Wiggers, a longtime lobbyist in Helena, said in a recent interview. She stopped short of endorsing a mandate, but given the upgrades to the previously unusable system, said she wouldn’t oppose one either.

“There’s no point in turning it in if it isn’t going to be used,” she added. “If we’re all just going to dump loads of paper on them and they’re just going to put it in a box and put it in another room, then we’ve all just wasted a bunch of time.”

Reporting requirements for lobbying in Montana also apply only to those activities directed at state lawmakers — a distinction that isn’t lost on them. Those expenses are occasionally captured, though, with some reports listing statewide elected officials among the attendees at dinners hosted by lobbyists.

But since a pair of Supreme Court decisions in 1981 struck down parts of the lobbying statutes that applied to other government officials, the Legislature has done little to tweak the law.

The most significant law guiding lobbying and reporting in the last 50 years wasn’t enacted by lawmakers, but through citizen initiative. In 1980, voters overwhelmingly approved Initiative 85, which established requirements for principals to register with the state and disclose lobbying activities, including spending on individual public officials.

Since then, legislative changes to the lobbying statutes have been so few and far between that until this year, that section of state law still referred to the use of telegraphs as a form of political communication.

Sen. Doug Kary, R-Billings, who has been a member of the State Administration and Veteran’s Affairs Interim Committee for nearly a decade, carried one of that committee’s bills earlier this year. After 18 months of discussion, it mainly amounted to a cleanup bill, rewriting the lobbying definitions to conform to earlier court rulings and updating some of the language, including “telegraph.” It was signed into law earlier this after earning near-unanimous approval in the Legislature.

“That bill, we could have done a lot more with it, but the appetite was not there,” Kary said in an interview. “… The more we got done, the less they seemed to want to do it all of a sudden. We wanted stuff done for the judiciary and all that, and the appetite to apply it to the judiciary and [executive branches] wasn’t there.”

The SAVA Committee has already begun its work for the current interim, and lobbying issues haven’t been part of the conversation. Kary noted that with an in-depth study of the Montana State Fund and other work already assigned to the committee, the lobbyist reporting system is unlikely to get another hard look before the 2023 session.

Montana has long been among the nation’s most strict when it comes to campaign finance disclosure — an area of political spending that accounts for a far greater sum of money than lobbying.

Pete Quist is the deputy research director for OpenSecrets, a nonprofit that tracks spending in politics. He characterized Montana’s lobbying requirements as comparable to other states, only about half of which require principals to disclose their exact payments to lobbyists. But he also stressed that failing to pull that information together in one place keeps the public in the dark about how much total money was spent, and where it went.

“They’re working with, talking with our elected officials, which matters as they sit down and try to affect how these votes are done, how they’re drafted, what kind of amendments are drafted for bills to be friendly to an industry or to be friendly to an ideology,” Quist said. Compared with campaign finance, “lobbying data is arguably more important, where we can get it, because of that direct impact on public policy.”