Get an insider’s look into what’s happening in and around the halls of power with expert reporting, analysis and insight from the editors and reporters of Montana Free Press. Sign up to get the free Capitolized newsletter delivered to your inbox every Thursday.
December 19, 2024
Programming note: Montana Free Press staff are on holiday Christmas week, so Capitolized will be taking a break as well. We’ll be back in your inbox on Thursday, Jan. 2, 2025.
Montana’s political cop is struggling to keep track of lobbyists’ spending, legislative auditors have found.
Speaking to the Legislative Audit Committee on Tuesday, an analyst said sampled lobbying reports filed with the Commissioner of Political Practices were missing key information. Businesses and organizations lobbying the Legislature, known as principals, failed to identify what bills they were trying to influence, their physical addresses, and expenses — all of which are required to be reported.
Deputy auditor Christiane Rudmann told legislators this week the COPP office has been too overwhelmed to scrutinize the content of lobbying reports and instead focused on filing deadlines.
“Staff told us that bills and subjects lobbyists worked on are not the focus of their review,” Rudmann told the Legislative Audit Committee. “We were told that the office had to choose between ensuring either timeliness or completeness, due to the high workload and limited resources, and that they chose to focus on timeliness.
The law requires the Commissioner of Political Practices to inspect reports and follow up on issues of noncompliance. The legislative auditor is recommending that records be reported only electronically, and not by paper. Hard copies of lobbying reports are accepted currently, but are not combined with electronic reports, which means the public must inspect two different databases to get the full picture of what lobbyists are up to.
Rudmann’s report recommends that lobbyists report monthly when the Legislature is in session and quarterly when it isn’t. Currently the state requires just three lobbying reports over a two-year period.
Commissioner of Political Practices Chris Gallus agreed with the recommendations, but said lawmakers would have to provide him with more staff and resources to comply. Gallus has six employees who shepherd candidates through campaign compliance, review conduct complaints, and process reports for lobbyists and the 450 businesses and organizations lobbying state government.
Reports are due in mid-February when the Legislature is in session, 30 days after the Legislature adjourns, and once in February in years the Legislature isn’t in session. Monthly reports are required only when lobbying expenses are greater than $5,000, a threshold auditors concluded allows some activity to go unnoticed.
“Say a lobbyist receives a monthly retainer payment of $4,500 from their principal. This lobbyist is approaching [a legislator] in any of the non-mandatory months, for example, after the session, but in the context of an interim committee, and the principal who’s hiring that lobbyist doesn’t have any other expenses that would make them cross that $5,000 threshold. That lobbying activity will not be reported, which all means the public has no way of learning about it,” Rudmann said.
The auditor recommends getting rid of the $5,000 threshold and requiring monthly reports during the legislative session and quarterly reports the rest of the time.
Rep. Fiona Nave, R-Columbus, questioned why getting reports filed on time is prioritized over making sure information in the reports is accurate.
“It appears to me that if I get information that’s timely, but it’s not accurate, it doesn’t do anything for me,” Nave said. “It’s better to be complete and accurate.”
Gallus agreed with Nave. He said if reports were automated, blank spaces where required details should be could trigger a prompt for the missing information.
“It might just trigger as a reminder, like, ‘Yeah, I did buy Sen. Flowers those two steaks and he took a lobster home.’ People will forget things, and if we trigger them, maybe that will increase the reporting.”
The scenario posed by Gallus was hypothetical, not a factual example of Senate Minority Leader Pat Flowers, D-Belgrade, going full surf and turf on a lobbyist.
—Tom Lutey
Rural Montana’s China Tech Challenge
Montana’s two largest telephone cooperatives took a multimillion-dollar hit in 2019 when the federal government pulled the plug on Chinese tech company Huawei.
Not-for-profit rural telephone providers had spent millions on Huawei’s bargain-priced tech to improve cell phone service in rural areas where for-profit companies invested little if anything.
Co-ops including Nemont, in Scobey, and Triangle Communications, in Havre, were already years into their installation of Huawei tech in 2019 when the Trump administration identified the corporation as an extension of the Chinese government, capable of spying on U.S. communications. By that time, Huawei’s chief financial officer had been arrested in Canada for extradition to the United States.
The government put the clamps on Huawei’s products, while assuring the telcos that a solution was in the works. This week, the Senate approved $1 billion in compensation for affected phone companies by logrolling funding for the “Rip and Replace Act” into the National Defense Authorization Act, a major spending bill.
U.S. Sen. Steve Daines, R-Montana, sponsored the effort.
The money is still not enough to fully replace the cooperatives’ “unsecure tech,” according to Jessica Rosenworcel, chair of the Federal Communications Commission. Rosenworcel told senators last month that another $3 billion is needed to make rural phone providers nationwide whole.
Pointing specifically to Montana, the communications lobby warned that paving the cracks in America’s information superhighway requires money.
“This critical work cannot be completed with only 40 cents on the dollar, and costs incurred to date are reaching or surpassing the funding currently available,” Tim Donovan warned congressional leadership earlier this year. Donovan is CEO of the Competitive Carriers Association, the trade group for telecommunications carriers.
Without full funding, one Montana carrier “will be forced to reduce service by over 62%” (a coverage area of more than 1,500 square miles) Donovan warned. A large rural area in the upper plains won’t transition to 5G because it does not have full funding to remove the untrusted equipment.
The Tuesday vote means an estimated $67 million for Nemont to cover its Huawei replacement costs, but that’s just a final installment in compensation that the federal government estimated at $111 million in 2022. Triangle’s costs for two entities were roughly $12.6 million, though, like Nemont, its total compensation was larger: $21 million spread over two votes years apart. Another Montana telco, Velocity Communications, will have received an estimated $3 million in total.
In addition to removing Huawei tech, the telcos must rid themselves of tech from ZTE, another China firm banned from U.S. phone communications.
Capitolized solicited comment for this article from Nemont and Triangle, which is to say, we called. They didn’t respond.
—Tom Lutey
On Drones
“People are very concerned about these drones. Are they from a form of government? One doesn’t know that. Well, we don’t know that. Let me, let me retract. We don’t know that. But I assure you, there’s someone within the community, okay, the intelligence community, that knows what these things are, who sent them, and what information they’re gathering. And the American people are the only ones being kept in the dark.
“I passed legislation back in 2013 in the Montana state Legislature, when the drone thing was just starting to kick off, that said anyone using a drone in the state of Montana cannot take that information and use it in a court proceeding unless it was collected, any of that data was collected, pursuant to a duly authorized search warrant.”
—U.S. Rep. Matt Rosendale, R-Montana, discussing drones observed over New Jersey earlier this week on “American Sunrise,” a news program on Real America’s Voice.
Rosendale made national news in 2014 when he released a campaign ad in which he appeared to shoot down a surveillance drone.
—Tom Lutey