[ OUR OPINION ]
Education lobby
should comply with lawGOVERNOR Lingle reluctantly acknowledged recently that a committee she created to lobby for education reform was a private organization that didn't belong in state offices. She showed the group her office's exit, but the lobby has neglected to report its expenses to the state Ethics Commission. Lingle said it was a "technical violation" for the group to be provided public resources, but the continuing failure to comply with the state ethics law raises the question of when a series of technical violations become substantive.
THE ISSUE
An education lobby created by Governor Lingle has yet to file a expenditure report to the state Ethics Commission.
CARE, the acronym for Citizens Achieving Reform in Education, has yet to report its expenditures to the Ethics Commission. Its continued snubbing of the commission sends a disturbing message to other lobbies that the ethics law need not be taken seriously.
Lingle created CARE last October, and it was turned into a private nonprofit corporation at the close of last year so it could solicit funds to influence this year's Legislature to adopt her education package. In early February, CARE was registered with the state Campaign Spending Commission as a political action committee, the kind of organization that contributes to a candidate or, as in CARE's case, a political cause.
The governor suggested that the committee's operation out of the governor's Capitol office was acceptable because everything was done in the open. After the Ethics Commission decided last month that the expenditure of public funds on a private lobbying group was a violation of state law, Lingle accepted the ruling, along with a $29,843 check from CARE to the state to compensate taxpayers.
CARE had raised $80,000 in private donations from builder Castle & Cooke, the Unity House labor umbrella and a family. Any organization that spends at least $750 during a reporting period to influence legislative action is required to report those expenditures to the Ethics Commission. When Bob Awana, Lingle's chief of staff and CARE's president, was asked by the Star-Bulletin's Rob Perez in April how much of the donated money went toward lobbying expenses, he said he had no breakdown of expenditures.
By that time, CARE already had missed the deadline at the end of March for organizations to report to the Ethics Commission what they had spent on lobbying activity over the first two months of the year. The deadline to report lobbying expenses for March and April came at the end of May. CARE has yet to file a report with the commission.
When Awana was asked by Perez in April why the organization over which he presides had not filed the first report, he said he did not know. He didn't return Perez's phone calls last week.
