BILL ANALYSIS �
SENATE COMMITTEE ON ELECTIONS
AND CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENTS
Senator Lou Correa, Chair
BILL NO: SB 1001 HEARING DATE:
4/19/12
AUTHOR: YEE ANALYSIS BY:
Darren Chesin
AMENDED: 4/16/12
FISCAL: YES
SUBJECT
Political Reform Act: lobbyists and committees: fees
DESCRIPTION
Existing law , pursuant to the Political Reform Act of 1974
(PRA), requires the Secretary of State (SOS), in
consultation with the Fair Political Practices Commission
(FPPC), to provide online and electronic filing processes
for use by specified political committees, lobbyists,
lobbying firms, and lobbyist employers
Those processes must enable a user to comply with all
relevant disclosure requirements. The SOS must also make
all the data filed available on the Internet for public
viewing in an easily understood format. This online
reporting and disclosure system is commonly referred to as
the Cal-Access system.
Existing law requires all state candidates and state
political committees who are required to file campaign
reports to file those reports online or electronically if
the cumulative amount of contributions received,
expenditures made, loans made, or loans received is $25,000
or more.
Existing law requires that lobbying firms and lobbyist
employers register with the SOS, and authorizes the SOS to
charge each lobbying firm and lobbyist employer a fee of up
to $25 per year for each lobbyist required to be listed on
its registration statement. Currently, the SOS charges $25
every two years.
Existing law provides that if any person, candidate or
committee files an original statement of economic interest
(SEI), campaign statement or report after any deadline
imposed by the PRA, that filer, in addition to any other
penalties or remedies established by the PRA, is subject to
a penalty of $10 per day after the deadline until the
statement or report is filed to the officer with whom the
statement or report is required to be filed. This penalty
need not be enforced by the filing officer if on an
impartial basis he or she determines that the late filing
was not willful and that enforcement of the penalty will
not further the purposes of the PRA, except that no penalty
may be waived if certain statements or reports are not
filed within specified time periods. The filing officer
must deposit any funds received under this section into the
general fund of the jurisdiction of which he or she is an
officer.
This bill would increase the maximum amount of the lobbying
firm and lobbyist employer fee to $50 per year and would
also require each political committee that receives
contributions totaling $1,000 or more in a calendar year
(recipient candidate, general purpose, ballot measure
committees, etc.) to pay a similar fee of not more than $50
per year to the SOS.
This bill would require the FPPC to adjust these fee limits
on December 1 of each even-numbered year to reflect any
increase in the Consumer Price Index and to round the
adjustment to the nearest $5.
This bill would establish the Political Disclosure, Access,
and Transparency Account in the State Treasury in which
would be deposited all monies collected for lobbying,
lobbyist employer, and political recipient committee
registration fees as well as $10 per day late filing
penalties. This bill would further declare that it is the
intent of the Legislature that monies deposited into this
account be expended for the maintenance, repair, and
improvement of the SOS's Cal-Access online disclosure
program.
BACKGROUND
Cal-Access Issues and Status According to the SOS : Created
in 1999, Cal-Access is a database and filing system the SOS
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has used to make much of the lobbying and campaign finance
information available online at no cost to users.
Cal-Access is a suite of applications developed in 13
different programming languages which, until recently, ran
the system on a server cluster and associated components
that are more than 12 years old, using an uncommon version
of the Unix operating system. While the SOS has the
funding to maintain the existing hardware and software,
finding parts and qualified people to do the maintenance on
such outdated equipment has been increasingly difficult.
The Cal-Access system went down November 30, 2011 was
restored December 7, 2011 went down December 9, 2011 and
was restored again on December 30, 2011. The causes of the
outages were layered and complex and no quick fix was
available.
The recovery efforts pursued in December should stabilize
Cal-Access and enable it to continue running, but the
system can never be made stronger or patched with new
features. Any attempt to upgrade or modernize Cal-Access
could be as risky, time-consuming, and expensive as
developing and deploying a new system. Even the December
work to restore Internet availability of Cal-Access will
not last forever. It is highly likely that Cal-Access will
require more robust servers in the next three to four years
simply to continue providing access to the ever-growing
volume of information.
The cost of an entirely new system and the speed with which
it can be deployed will depend on many factors and
ultimately can only be borne out through the state's IT
procurement process, which history has shown to be lengthy
and expensive. Before the Cal-Access outage began on
November 30, the SOS was looking at existing commercial
off-the-shelf (COTS) products, as well as systems used by
other states to prepare a feasibility study report (FSR) -
the project blueprint that is the required precursor for an
IT project and subject to approval by state control
agencies. Any consideration of an FSR, along with the
subsequent legislative and gubernatorial review of any
budget change proposal to conduct a procurement, would take
into account the replacement of Cal-Access in the context
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of the two major IT procurements - VoteCal and California
Business Connect - that the SOS is currently conducting.
COMMENTS
1. According to the author , Cal-Access, the disclosure
website that provides financial information supplied by
state candidates, donors, and lobbyists, among others,
has had a slew of technical issues recently that have
resulted in a lack of access to this information by the
public. This information is essential to ensuring
transparency and accountability in affairs that directly
impact the people of this state. This bill seeks to
raise additional funds to be used on the maintenance of
the Cal-Access website to ensure that this information
is continuously available as it was intended to be by
raising the fee for lobbying firms and lobbyist
employers to $50 per year. This bill will also require
the Fair Political Practices Commission to adjust this
fee on December 1 of each even-numbered year to reflect
any increase in the Consumer Price Index and to round
the adjustment to the nearest $5.
2. How Much Money Would this Bill Raise ? The committee
estimates that between lobbyist registrations, committee
registrations, and late fines, this bill could provide
approximately $600,000 per year for the proposed
Cal-Access account.
POSITIONS
Sponsor: California Common Cause
Support: California Newspaper Publishers Association
Fair Political Practices Commission
Oppose: Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association
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