Many records, little information;

State’s methods for reporting government lobbying expenses mesh indirect and direct spending. The result: inflated figures and unreliable comparisons with other agencies or private firms.

The Orange County Register (California)

At first blush, it was an incredible story.

I had downloaded lobbying expenditures from the Secretary of State’s Web site and found that over a little more than six and half years the County of Orange had spent $5.1 million on lobbying — more than the Irvine Co., Pacific Life Insurance and the Walt Disney Co. combined.

According to the state’s official numbers, Orange County ranked 32nd out of 4,321 lobbying interests, just seven spots behind British Petroleum ($5.9 million) and 10 behind Verizon ($6 million).

Too bad the numbers aren’t reliable.

Digging much deeper, I found the state’s reporting standards for government agencies differ from other lobbying interests. Governments, unlike other groups, are required to report membership dues to organizations that spend more than $15,000 or 10 percent of their annual expenditures on lobbying. So while a county has to count its membership fee to a politically active chamber of commerce, a business doesn’t have to.

That might not sound like a big deal, but $3.5 million, or nearly 70 percent, of Orange County’s reported lobbying expenses appear to be membership fees or other organizational costs. Over the six full years I examined, Orange County spent an average of $560,000 annually on fees to a total of more than 150 organizations. Only about $1.5 million went to direct lobbying.

Moreover, some organizations charge different dues depending on the size of the member. In 2005 and 2006, for example, Orange County paid a total of $333,051 to the California State Association of Counties while Contra Costa County, a third of Orange County’s size, paid the organization $110,496.

Then there’s over-reporting. Governments, not surprisingly, might not know whether an organization meets the $15,000 or 10 percent lobbying threshold. So in the interest of full disclosure, I’m told some agencies report dues to all organizations — regardless of whether they qualify.

All of which makes the state’s publicly available numbers grossly misleading.

You can compare expenses for businesses and other groups, but you can’t accurately compare them to governments or even compare one government to another. You could, I suppose, read the fine print and subtract membership dues, but that also could eliminate costs for indirect lobbying.

So, under a system designed to make government more transparent, it’s incredibly difficult to know how much of your tax dollars are being spent on lobbying or how that compares to other jurisdictions. Just getting a fuzzy picture takes a lot of work.

“I’m not surprised,” said political watchdog Carmen Balber of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights when I told her about my frustration reviewing the reports. “That’s what you get when you look at lobbying reports,” she said: an incomplete picture.