Sunday, July 26, 2009
Following the money trail
Elizabeth Strother
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From the RoundTable blog
This is not about payday lending. It's about a campaign finance system that sets no limits, and how Virginia's voters can figure out when their elected public servants might be tempted to slip over to the dark side, where contributors can curry legislative favors with hefty sums. Or not.
Let's say the issue at hand is payday lending.
I don't see eye-to-eye with Del Onzlee Ware on payday lending. I think Virginia should ban this form of small consumer loan as predatory. Ware does not. He voted against before he voted for a 2008 reform capping the annual interest rate at 36 percent (plus fees) and limiting borrowers to one loan at a time.
Ware, whose 11th House District covers parts of Roanoke and Roanoke County, has explained that some of his constituents need small, short-term loans occasionally to meet unexpected expenses. In an emergency, they have nowhere else to turn.
In other words, though borrowers who live paycheck to paycheck can easily fall into a ruinous cycle of high-interest debt, he pretty much buys the industry's line.
Which made me wonder how politically indebted he might be to payday lenders.
So I went online to www.vpap.org, the Virginia Public Access Project. There, I found that Ware, who is running for re-election in November, has received a modest $750 so far this year from lending companies/consumer credit donors -- all of it, actually, from one donor, Community Loans of America.
It's early yet in the campaign season, though. Besides, most payday lenders have closed up shop in Virginia or shifted to more lucrative, less restricted products. So I dug deeper. It took a whole other mouse click to find how much the industry has contributed to Ware's campaigns since he first ran for his House seat in 2003: $7,000.
Much as I disagree with him on this issue, I have to figure his stand on payday lending is an honest one. Money corrupts, but surely it takes bigger bucks.
You might not think so. You might be appalled that a lawmaker who represents many working poor takes anything at all from an industry that, till the General Assembly finally reined it in, skimmed off a lot of hard-earned dollars from desperate people.
Either way you look at it, the information is useful to voters.
VPAP gives you the facts, without political spin. It gathers data on campaign contributions, feeds the numbers into an online database and makes the information easily available to the public. For free. People will make of it what they will.
The project is the brainchild of former Roanoke Times political reporter David Poole, who took what was to be a leave of absence back in 1997 to work for a consortium of Virginia newspapers determined to bring public accountability to the state's wide-open campaign finance system. The sky's the limit; to keep candidates honest and avoid the appearance of undue influence, they only have to identify donors of more than $100.
A fundamental flaw, as a history of VPAP on its Web site notes, was "the fact that the public had no meaningful access to the information contained in paper disclosure reports sitting in file cabinets at the State Board of Elections."
The nonpartisan, nonprofit VPAP has changed that. The more people who know about and use the database, in this gubernatorial election year, the better; if more help to support it, that will be better yet.
Poole, executive director of what is now a three-person operation, says the project is getting by on a spare, $250,000 budget, but times are tight. "We had a water cooler," he said last week. "We gave that up."
Newspapers, which Poole says make up 12 to 15 percent of VPAP's donor base, face troubles of their own and are having to adapt with online products. VPAP is trying to reposition itself, figuring out how to offer online content to newspapers that won't require staff time.
The recession, meanwhile, has had an impact on fund-raising, he said. "VPAP is more of a concept. We're not a food bank or a homeless shelter, taking care of immediate needs. Some corporate donors are telling us they're refocusing to immediate needs and away from arts and more esoteric things.
"It's all about value. If you can show people the value, you're OK."
The value of knowing how much money donors give to elected officials can be quite high. It won't tell voters everything they need to know about their lawmakers' integrity, but it's an essential piece of the puzzle. It's a valuable start.
Strother is a member of The Roanoke Times editorial board.
