Lobby registry is a good idea now

District One County Commissioner Kim Wigington has twice tried to garner the support of her fellow members on the Monroe Board of County Commissioners for a measure that would require county lobbyists to register as such and pay a fee for the privilege.

Lobbyists generally are folks that represent someone else for money and try to curry favor, both politically and economically, from some governmental body.

It’s not hard to understand, really it’s not, just who lobbyists are, and at whom the proposed registration ordinance was aimed.

Those people who represent commercial entities that stand to make profit from county decisions are lobbyists.

Those people who are paid to represent a person or group of people for whom they don’t work or with whom they are not a member that will benefit from county policy decisions are lobbyists.

Attorneys have their own criteria, set out in the ethics rules of the state, and they only have to read those rules to know if they would be required to register as a lobbyist.

Any person paid to present the viewpoint of a third party is a lobbyist.

Now really, do we find those definitions of lobbyist so hard to understand?

A lobbyist is not the director of a non-profit organization asking the county commission for more budget money. A lobbyist is not the director of a non-profit that represents the viewpoint of the membership for whom they volunteer or work since that viewpoint is the consensus viewpoint of a portion of the electorate, or constituency of the elected official whose opinion is being tested.

These are what many of the common folk consider a lobbyist, and what many of the common folk don’t consider a lobbyist.

Common sense, something that all too often is lacking in government, tells us what a lobbyist is and isn’t.

And, if we want to, it is easy to muddy the waters.

But why would we want to muddy the waters?

By asking that lobbyists be registered, and pay a fee fore that registration, we are asking them to foot the bill for the inordinate amount of time they usually take from our elected officials and paid staff as compared to the rest of us.

By asking that lobbyists register, we would know for whom they worked when they asked our elected leadership for decisions favorable to those for whom they worked.

By asking lobbyists to register, we also can find out how long they spend in the offices of individual elected officials trying to sway policy decisions to the favorable side for their clients.

Elected officials will be lobbied by any number of individuals. Staff members will be lobbied by any number of individuals. It is the nature of the beast in any democratic form of government.

I guess what we want to know is who is bending the ear of our elected officials, and for whom do they work?

The very fact that such a proposal sees the light of day tells us just how little trust we have in elected leadership these days.

And agreeing to this registration effort of lobbyists would go a long way toward restoring some of that trust by our elected officials.

But instead of being embraced for the move toward transparency that it could be, some of our elected leadership instead attempted to ridicule and belittle the proposal, claiming that it so convoluted the process of getting information that even the homeowner asking questions would be barred from speaking to an elected official without registering and paying a fee.

We all know that’s hogwash and a smoke screen to protect the friends of elected officials who are owed political favors that stand to make serious dollars from policy decisions, or who, perhaps unduly, influence those same policy decisions.

Many other areas have lobbyist registration rules that work just fine and the voter can see who is attempting to influence their elected leaders and on what issues.

Not only do we strongly support the proposal to register lobbyists, we believe the proposal should encompass both elected officials and staff.

The taxpayer deserves to know who is trying to influence this county’s decisions and at what level.

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