| Author |
 Topic  |
|
|
Admin
Forum Admin
|
 Posted - 03/14/2004 : 2:23:11 PM
|
From the Wisconsin State Journal - 3/13/04
The naked truth about lobbying
Thursday was not a good day to ask Jolene Plautz about naked people.
The Legislature was in a hell-bent for mediocrity session, tossing around potential laws like so many martini coasters and the scorekeeper-lobbyists were hanging on every vote. It was a very busy day.
I just wanted to ask Plautz, a veteran lobbyist, and, before that, a longtime legislative aide to Democratic legislators, about lobbying for the Naturist Action Committee.
But she would have none of it.
"It doesn't help me to talk about the lobbying business," she said.
"I prefer not to talk about it," she said, and hung up.
The name of her client - actually one of her several clients - came up after I thumbed through the Wisconsin Ethics Board's 2003 Lobbying Report. A chart of the "The Big Players" includes the usual suspects, organizations who spend lots of dollars on lobbyists. We read about them every day; Wisconsin Education Association Council, Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, Wisconsin Independent Businesses, Wisconsin Merchants Federation, Wisconsin Counties Association, Wisconsin Hospital Association.
Those alone spent $3,588,896 of the total lobbying spending of $26.2 million (equaling the 2004 Milwaukee Brewers payroll, the board reports, curiously) during the first year of the two-year session.
There were 651 organizations registered to lobby in 2003. There were 622 lobbyists licensed to lobby for just one organization, and 136 lobbyists licensed for more than one.
Amazing but true: To those who say there are no jobs available, the board reported there were 251 bills for which no lobbying organization indicated any interest.
Back to naked people.
Of the 249,000 hours devoted to "lobbying-related matters" in 2003, the Naturist Action Committee covered 11, for which it paid Plautz $5,000. (They are required to report all this, an unenviable task that couldn't be assigned to a nicer group.) These 11 hours were devoted to Assembly Bill 574, which is the Legislature's latest attempt to ban naked people at the Mazomanie beach by banning nudity on any public land. (It is also, if you do a detailed search of all the bills for the entire session, the only mention of the word "nipple" in the database.)
This is the bill that defines "nude" as "not wearing a fully opaque covering over the genitals, pubic area, or buttocks or not wearing a fully opaque covering over the female breast below the top of the nipple."
The bill itself has gone nowhere, but it is a good example of how a contract lobbyist works. The nudist organization was against it and needed someone to represent its views and hired Plautz to do so. She also is listed as lobbying for Kwik Trip, the Wine Institute, Wisconsin Curves Association (yes, the women's workout club, involved in a successful effort to get an exception to public accommodation laws), the State Horse Council and the Wisconsin Professional Animal Chiropractors Association.
The animal chiropractors, by the way, spent $7,200 lobbying in 2003, while the human chiropractors spent $55,771.
(These numbers are accessible with a little searching and a lot of persistence on the Internet at http://ethics.state.wi.us.)
The list is full of interesting numbers and ironies.
Strong Capital Management, the troubled mutual founds company which runs - at least for now - the Edvest program, spent $37,061 on lobbying.
Mothers Against Drunk Drivers spent $81.
The Circus World Museum found $12,995 last December to pay for 79 hours of lobbyists' time in its effort to get the state to spend up to $1.5 million or "two times the amount of contributions" to run the museum.
The Funeral Directors Association spent almost the same amount as the Wisconsin
|
Country: USA
| Posts: 1888 |
|
| |
Topic |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Nudist-Resorts.Org Discussion Forum Bulletin Board Nudism Clothing Optional Resort Naturism Nude Beaches |
© 2002-2020 SUN |
 |
|
|
The naked truth about lobbying
