Rep. Bob Helm, R-Fair Haven, recently told an Atlanta TV station that lobbyists paid for his trip to an American Legislative Exchange Council conference earlier this month.
Channel 11, an NBC affiliate, caught Helm on hidden camera sitting at a Savannah bar as part of an expose focused on corporate lobbyists’ influence on state lawmakers. ALEC is a conservative group that develops model legislation written by corporations. Lawmakers, mostly Republicans, then disseminate the draft bills to statehouses around the country.
Helm’s face was blurred out, but his voice was unmistakeable, and in a phone interview the state representative said it was him alright. “I was eating a salad, having a fine time, when a woman asked me if I was there for ALEC,” Helm said in an interview on Tuesday. He didn’t know she was a reporter.
The reporter asked Helm if he paid his own way to the ALEC conference. Helm said, “Well, on a trip like this, this is where you would come in,” gesturing toward a lobbyist sitting nearby.
“I’m the state (bleep), state chair of ALEC, and I look for financial supporters and lobbyists and the like to send us a couple thousand bucks every so often, that gives me money to help those folks with …”
Helm filled in the blank in an interview. The help he’s referring to comes in the form of reimbursements or “scholarships” for lawmakers to attend ALEC conferences.
“They gave me a room there one night,” Helm said. In addition, he’ll get $350 to $400 for travel expenses, or about half the cost of travel.
Helm, the state chair of ALEC, says lobbyists give him money that he sends along to ALEC. The money is used to reimburse Vermont lawmakers who attend ALEC conferences. Helm is trying to drum up money to help Vermont lawmakers go to the next conference this fall in San Diego.
The state rep, who has long served on the House Appropriations Committee, says he has “revved up” the ALEC chapter in Vermont and has boosted the number of members to 20, up from four just a few years ago.
ALEC is a conservative nonprofit group that writes model legislation for state lawmakers. The Center for Media and Democracy has described ALEC as a “pay-to-play operation” that gives corporations an opportunity to “advance their legislative wish lists.” Companies make donations to ALEC to support legislative junkets. About 15 percent of ALEC membership is Democratic.
Helm says he doesn’t bring model ALEC legislation to the Vermont Statehouse, but sometimes he uses ideas he gets from the conferences. “I haven’t used them that way,” he says. “If I have an issue here, let’s call it fracking, I can call them and see what other states like mine are doing. I don’t have to reinvent the wheel, and that’s what NCSL and CSG do.”
In one breath, Helm compares ALEC to VPIRG, which advocates in the Vermont Statehouse for environmental, health and campaign finance legislation, and in the next, he puts ALEC on par with the nonpartisan National Conference on State Legislatures.
Helm says the group’s conservative reputation is overstated. “I can’t help it if Democrats typically aren’t as pro-business as Republicans.”
The state representative says ALEC gets a bad rap and is misrepresented by the media. “If anyone thinks I’m walking around and doing what business wants, and I think that’s not true, I do what I think is correct,” Helm said. “But if it aligns with the way business sees it, I don’t regret it one bit. I think that’s what ALEC is all about.
“In Vermont we want to make a dirty thing out of it when we support a little free enterprise,” Helm says.
In Helm’s view, NCSL is a little left-leaning, and his biggest complaint is that House Speaker Shap Smith won’t reimburse lawmakers for ALEC conferences.
The state legislative budget pays for about $120,000 in dues to NCSL (everyone in the House and Senate is a member) and also budgets about $46,000 a year for NCSL conference expenses. Smith decides which legislators are eligible for reimbursements.
“They get their membership paid right out of taxpayers’ pocket,” Helm says. “ALEC gets nada. Everybody makes this a story about capitalistic doom and gloom. We have to pay our own way, and ALEC has corporate sponsors who have the same belief in government — federalism, free enterprise, healthy vibrant business and smaller government.”
Smith said he wouldn’t support state reimbursement of ALEC conferences “because I think that the nature of ALEC is significantly different than the nature of NCSL or other organizations like that.” Most conferences are about issues and leadership, not drafting legislation, he said.
Rep. Don Turner, the GOP minority leader in the House, says he isn’t a member of ALEC and he doesn’t consider NCSL partisan. Turner says he wouldn’t go on a trip paid for by lobbyists.
“It just doesn’t look good,” Turner said. “If you feel strongly enough to go to one of these then you should pay for it on your own dime.”
Turner said the House should require representatives to disclose junkets as one of the reporting requirements under new ethics rules.
Smith says there are a lot of trips that are offered to be paid for by organizations that end up being supported by businesses and corporations. He points to an all-expenses paid trip to Rhode Island paid for by cable companies that many lawmakers attend.
Bipartisan leadership groups, like the National Speakers Conference, also often pay for travel and expenses, and the organizations themselves receive corporate support. The purpose of the leadership organizations is to get people together to talk about issues “that you deal with in the role that you’re playing,” he said.
But draft legislation is not a part of the conversation, Smith said. “Quite frankly, I’m not sure I’d go to one if that’s what the agenda was. I just can’t imagine that’s what I’d want to do with time away.”
Smith was recently invited to an NCSL golfing junket in Ireland that he turned down because he said there wasn’t enough leadership training offered.
“I think we as legislators, and I’ve seen it with some legislators not just here but elsewhere, we get ourselves into trouble when we start looking at these trips as trips, as opposed to ways to better develop ourselves,” Smith said.
The larger issue, Smith said, is the preponderance of lobbyists at all legislative and state officer conferences. At the National Governors Association meetings, for example, there are “tons of lobbyists,” some of whom are from Vermont.
“That’s the problem with the money in politics issue we have right now,” Smith says.
