OUR VIEW: FPPC needs to grow back its regulatory teeth
By The Bakersfield Californian
The Fair Political Practices Commission, under relatively new leadership, was supposed to be reassuring California voters that it has racheted up its scrutiny of political fundraising and other, related affairs of elective government.
At least that's what commission chairwoman Ann Ravel, whom Gov. Jerry Brown appointed in February 2011, intimated in a visit to The Californian's editorial board last month. Ravel said part of the FPPC's mission is to boost voter confidence in the electoral process and that going after campaign-finance law violators was the most effective way to accomplish that.
But Ravel's agency has already pulled back from that posture, overhauling its regulations to ease restrictions on lobbyists' gifts to lawmakers, end the practice of notifying the public of pending investigations and drastically cut back on open meetings.
Political watchdog groups are concerned, and with good reason. "I think the agenda is to basically castrate the commission," FPPC Commissioner Ronald Rotunda told the Los Angeles Times. Rotunda, unlike Ravel and most members of the FPPC, is a non-Brown appointee, having been selected by the state controller.
Ravel says the idea is to focus on the worst offenders rather than those who commit relatively small mistakes. But the consequences of committing small mistakes need not be big -- the principles of California campaign law must be aggressively upheld so that oversights do not evolve into intentional acts of deception.
Money is the biggest obstacle to honest government; that's why the FPPC was created in 1974 and why it must grow its teeth back before lobbyists' already-outsized influence grows even bigger.
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