Arkansas House lawmakers approved a bill Monday that would create new gift exemptions to voter-approved ethics changes, with promises that they would go back to address concerns raised by one of the original drafters of the constitutional amendment on the issue.
Immediately after the body voted 83-8 for House Bill 1401, its sponsor, Speaker Jeremy Gillam, R-Judsonia, said changes would be sought in the Senate to clarify some of the provisions.
The legislation would allow state elected officials to have trips abroad paid for or arranged by foreign governments employing lobbyists, and allow lobbyists to pay for "transportation for tours or briefings."
Gillam said the intent of those tours would be for lawmakers to have ground transportation covered on local trips to sites such as the Big River Steel plant in Osceola.
The speaker previously told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette his bill is not intended to allow for energy industry-paid trips to coal mines in other states. Such tours occurred prior to the passage of Amendment 94 to the Arkansas Constitution.
Those activities were prohibited under Amendment 94, which voters passed in 2014 to extend term limits, change campaign finance laws, and prohibit certain gifts to state elected officials from lobbyists.
"We're going to clarify when we amend it in the Senate because the intent was only for it to be short-term ground transportation from a committee meeting to an off-site tour or something of that nature," Gillam told reporters afterward Monday.
Speaking against the bill, Rep. Warwick Sabin, D-Little Rock, said that as one of Amendment 94's crafters, he worked diligently with others to make compromises on specific language. While saying the law has required tweaking, Sabin said the changes in the bill create "a loophole you could drive a freight train through."
Sabin said lawmakers should take more time to narrowly craft changes to address their concerns before sending the bill to the Senate.
The changes proposed in the speaker's bill are not meant to greatly expand gift-giving opportunities for lobbyists, said Rep. Michelle Gray, R-Melbourne, who presented the bill on the House floor Monday. Instead, they were meant to narrowly address issues that had come up since the law was enacted, she said.
For example, she said the current law would prevent lawmakers from accepting travel expenses from foreign governments in order to conduct trade missions.
Amendment 94 provides gift exemptions for informational material such as books and pamphlets, but specifically states payments for travel are not informational material. House Bill 1401 removes that exemption.
"We couldn't do some of the things we wanted to do as a chamber for fear of violating these ethics laws," Gray said.
Asked by a reporter if the bill would allow legislators to be reimbursed for conference trips by political groups such as the National Rifle Association or the American Civil Liberties Union, Gray said she wasn't sure but it wasn't supposed to. She said the language should be changed to reflect that.
Lobbyist-paid trips domestically and abroad are what Amendment 94 was designed to prevent, Sabin said, and should be kept that way.
"It was meant to kill junkets, which is exactly what it has done," Sabin said.
A Section on 02/07/2017