Updates: Local candidates finance reports, GoMoos still endangered
This week I have updates on two stories I’ve been covering that affect life on our coast: stopping the destruction of the means to track the influence of money on elected officials in our bigger towns, and the dismantling of the Gulf of Maine Ocean Observing System, whose data saves lives, money, and natural resources.
First, money in politics. As I reported this winter (“Destroying the Candidate’s Paper Trail, Working Waterfront, February-March 2009), clerks in Portland, Scarborough, Biddeford, Brunswick and other large municipalities have been destroying the campaign finance disclosures of candidates for city office in as little as two years after an election on the questionable advice of state officials. This makes it impossible to trace long-term links between elected officials and the property developers, labor unions, lobbyists, activists, and others with whom they deal-which is the entire purpose of their existence.
At present the rules-which affect the 13 Maine towns and cities with a population in excess of 15,000-are silent on the retention of campaign finance disclosures. But officials at the Maine State Archives have decided they are therefore “election records not otherwise specified” and so have advised city and town clerks that they should therefore be destroyed after two years. In Portland, all paper and electronic copies of disclosures filed prior to 2006 have been destroyed, including those of sitting city councilors.
After my reports for Maine Things Considered and Working Waterfront, State Senator Justin Alfond (D-Portland) introduced a bill that would correct the situation. The bill, L.D. 1100, would place the long-term custodianship of municipal disclosures in the care of the state ethics commission, the body that retains (and posts online) all disclosures for county and statewide office.
“Money plays a huge part in politics, and it needs to be transparent where the money is coming from and how it is being spent,” Alfond said. “The state does this every year and I think they could do it a lot better than the clerks in these [13] communities who are already being so inundated with work in these election seasons.”
You’d think Alfond’s bill would be a shoo-in. After all, the key players like the bill.
“The clerks who are in the municipalities involved are supportive of this legislation,” says Portland City Clerk Linda Cohen, who says it would put everything in one location, accessible to all online, creating “absolute transparency.” “They are very willing to take this on.”
“We think it makes very good policy sense for the towns and cities, as they can use their resources better when they are focused on the voting process,” says Paul Lavin, assistant director of the State Ethics Commission, who says his organization can take on the additional records without asking the legislature for additional funds.
But the bill received a surprisingly chilly reception from lawmakers in Augusta.
At a hearing before the committee on state and local government April 6, all 12 lawmakers in attendance voted to kill the bill. There is no official record of the hearing, but multiple sources in attendance say lawmakers made remarks to the effect that they saw no problem with the existing system. Others were apparently unaware that the estimated start-up costs of the proposed changes-$33,125-would be covered by the ethics commission’s reserve fund (which is funded by fees on lobbyists) and would therefore present no additional burden on taxpayers.
But in an unusual turn of events, the co-chair of that committee, Senator Deborah Simpson (D-Lewiston/Auburn), has intervened to keep the bill alive. Simpson, who was absent from the April 6 hearing, said she was concerned by the reception LD 1100 had received and was lobbying her colleagues to reconsider.
“I think having some lasting record [of campaign donations] is good public policy, especially if you take Portland: it’s a big municipality and it’s a big deal,” Simpson said. “I hope my colleagues will reconsider.”
The lawmakers opposing the bill are senators Troy Jackson (D-Aroostook County) and Jonathan Courtney (R-York) and representatives Stephen Beaudette (D-Biddeford), James Schatz (D-Blue Hill), Andrea Boland (D-Sanford), Teresea Hayes (D-Buckfield), Bryan Kaenrath (D-South Portland), Michael Willette (D-Presque Isle), H. David Cotta (R-China), William Browne (R-Vassalboro), Tyler Clark (R-Easton), and Lance Harvell (R-Farmington).
The bill will receive a fresh look at a hearing in early May.
Meanwhile, out to sea, the Gulf of Maine Ocean Observing System (or GoMoos) has been partially dismantled because-after years of wrangling-the federal government has failed to come up with the $2 million a year needed to keep its data buoys fully operational.
GoMoos’ buoys have helped fishermen decide if it is safe to go out and harbor pilots determine the safest way to bring a tanker in. The U.S. Coast Guard uses the readings from offshore buoys to tighten its search patterns, increasing the likelihood of finding and rescuing distressed mariners. Scientists use their data stream to unlock the secrets of the gulf and to track the species on which fisheries depend.
Nonetheless, five of the network’s eleven buoys have already been hauled up (including those which forewarned Cooke Aquaculture when water cold enough to kill salmon was bearing down on its Washington County pens) and helped Portland pilots more safely guide ships into Portland Harbor.
The system has been estimated to save Americans $33 million a year in rescued property, reduced fuel costs, and avoided oil spills.
Who’s responsible? Ultimately the U.S. Congress, which has for years failed to fund the nation’s ocean observing systems, which in the past have gotten by on earmarks. With earmarks in disrepute, GoMoos and other ocean observing systems have been placed within a poorly-funded office of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, an agency which sources say has failed to champion them. NOAA officials I spoke to admit they have chosen to allow much of GoMoos to die on the vine in order to make resources available to build new systems in Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Washington state.
The only hope: somebody decides to use federal stimulus money to save the system, whose annual costs is about the same as a single M2A3 Bradley Fighting Vehicle.
-Colin Woodard is an award-winning journalist and author of The Lobster Coast, The Republic of Pirates, and Ocean’s End. www.colinwoodard.com