BY DAN WALTERS
This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.
In the late 1990s, the late Jay Michael and I coauthored a book, published by the University of California, that explored why and how interest groups employ lobbyists to represent them in Sacramento.
Michael was a retired lobbyist who provided innumerable stories about what happens out of public view to shape legislation and other official policy, such as the notorious “napkin deal” Willie Brown brokered in a Sacramento restaurant that changed tobacco liability and other tort law. I framed the process in the context of an ever-changing state and a Legislature undergoing a cultural and ideological evolution.
Click Here to Subscribe to the California Political Review
At the time there were about 1,200 registered lobbyists working the Capitol, not only those who sought to affect legislation but those who concentrated on regulations, contracts and other acts in California’s vast bureaucracy.
As a hobby Chris Micheli, a lobbyist whose firm represents 15 widely varying clients, dives into legislative minutiae and recently generated data on the growth of lobbyist activity.
Micheli found that the number of lobbying firms has grown from 433 to 484 over the last 10 years. More interestingly, the number of registered lobbyists had nearly tripled from 1,270 when Michael and I were writing our book to 3,245 in the current legislative session.
That seemingly huge increase is, Micheli explains, a little misleading because it includes 1,116 newly registered lobbyists in 2011-12 due to a change in law. Reacting to a corruption scandal in the California Public Employees Retirement System, the Legislature required registration of “placement agents,” who persuade the immense pension system to place millions or even billions of dollars into their clients’ investment firms.
“While the number of registered lobbyists has grown by 1,975 over the past 25 years, more than half of those registrations are attributable to the addition of placement agents,” Micheli says.
“Even taking those registrations out of the total figure, the number of registered lobbyists has still grown over 65% during the past quarter century.”
Speak Your Mind