$240 Million Education Contract Illustrates State Lobbying Loopholes
When California education officials awarded a $240 million, three-year contract to conduct Common Core testing for millions of school children this spring, they said it was an open and competitive process — and that Educational Testing Service, the winning company, simply had the best proposal.
Not everyone agrees the process was so open, nor do they agree that ETS was the clear choice. And several weeks of KQED News questions about the contracting process ended without a full set of answers.
California’s murky disclosure laws make it nearly impossible to know exactly what kinds of work private companies do to influence how thousands of state government contracts are awarded, including whether those same companies seek advantages at every step of the process with behind-the-scenes lobbying.
Existing state law generally limits the disclosure of influence to anyone being paid to advocate for changes in state law or regulations, the traditional kind of lobbying that’s largely focused around the work of the California Legislature and the executive branch. But a private company looking to influence the awarding of a state contract by one of dozens of state agencies and departments isn’t held to the same standards.
That means conversations between advocates and key decision-makers about the roughly 100,000 state contracts handed out each year — worth some $12 billion in taxpayer funds in 2014 and an average of $34 billion a year since 2010 — remain in the shadows, far from public scrutiny. The totals were culled from a state Department of General Services database that does not include contracts worth less than $5,000.
These numbers were culled from a California Deptartment of General Services database. The totals may be incomplete as DGS depends on departments and agencies to self-report their own totals and doesn’t request information on state contracts worth less than $5,000. The numbers represent the total amounts awarded, not paid out, in a calendar year.
These kinds of conversations are common knowledge among Sacramento insiders. And while many prominent lobbying firms in the capital city even advertise their expertise in helping to secure lucrative contracts, they are nonetheless allowed to keep that part of their business a secret.
Gary Winuk, the former chief enforcement officer for California’s Fair Political Practices Commission, said more than two dozen states and the federal government require disclosure of lobbying efforts to win government contracts. So do nearly all of California’s big cities and counties — including San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles and San Diego.
“To me it always seemed like a common sense idea,” Winuk said. “The same reason you want it for bills, you want it for (contracts), because $240 Million Education Contract Illustrates State Lobbying Loopholes | Political Muscle | The California Report | KQED News:
