Al Cross: Clear-Eyed Look At [Quid Pro Quo] Law-Making [In Kentucky].

Clear-eyed look at law-making
By Al Cross

FRANKFORT, Ky. — On the Kentucky General Assembly's website are pages for children, including the familiar “How a Bill Becomes Law,” but it only gives the bare procedural steps, such as introduction, referral, committees and so on. (lrc.ky.gov/kidspages/Road_to_Passage.pdf)

The “Legislative Facts” page for kids is a little more useful: “Only a state senator or representative can vote on a new idea for a law, but anyone can get involved. … Join forces and work with other people or groups that have the same ideas that you have and tell them all to contact their legislators.” (http://lrc.ky.gov/kidspages/legislative facts.htm">lrc.ky.gov/kidspages/legislative facts.htm)

But that still leaves out some very useful advice, such as:

Make lots of contributions to lawmakers' campaigns, and get your votes secured out of public view, before the legislative session begins.

Work with House and Senate leaders to get your bill referred to friendly committees, and move it quickly.

Hire plenty of lobbyists, overseen by an experienced executive of your trade association.

Sell your bill as a service to the public, not a private benefit for your members.

That was the strategy the Kentucky Optometric Association followed with amazing success this month, in an enterprise that could be a textbook example of how a bill becomes law.

The optometrists won passage of legislation that will let them do more things — including use a laser to fix complications that can arise from cataract surgery, something only ophthalmologists can do, except in Oklahoma. And, perhaps more important, it will let the state optometric board define the practice of optometry, which has been the province of the legislature.

This was no minor turf battle. “This may very well be the most important piece of legislation to affect my profession in my lifetime,” Harrodsburg optometrist Jeffrey Klosterman told the Danville Advocate-Messenger — which reported that Danville ophthalmologist Linda Katz agreed.

The battle in Frankfort was almost over before it began. A friendly Senate committee (Licensing, not Health) approved the bill Feb. 8, the day after it was introduced, and the Senate passed it that week, 33-3. The House was equally hospitable, and its 81-14 vote made the bill the first to pass both chambers this session. Gov. Steve Beshear signed it Thursday.

“It's one of our proudest moments,” said Darlene Eakin, who has been executive director of the Kentucky Optometric Association for 32 years, probably longer than any other executive of a Frankfort-based trade group, and has scored several legislative victories.

Eakin's experience counted, and so did that of her 18 lobbyists, 14 of whom weren't hired until the bill was filed. The stealthy strategy also included not mentioning the issue at any meetings of interim joint committees, where the legislature is supposed to take time to examine complex issues before the hurly-burly of a session.

Eakin said she used that tactic because the ophthalmologists' state organization and the broader physicians' group, the Kentucky Medical Association, wouldn't negotiate on a 2008 proposal by optometrists to let them provide medicated contact lenses. (KMA government-relations chief Marty White told me the lenses weren't federally approved, but that didn't keep the optometrists from attaching the measure to another bill and getting it passed.)

But what about legislators' due diligence and proper scrutiny of a bill that could have serious implications for eye patients?

“The legislators who supported this bill were aware of it, had been informed on these issues months and months in advance,” mainly by their local optometrists, whom they know and trust, Eakin told me.

Optometrists have advantages when it comes to local lobbying. They practice in 106 of Kentucky's 120 counties, while ophthalmologists are based in only 41. The broadest argument for the bill, and the best at least in political terms, was that it would make eye care more accessible and affordable in rural areas.

The legislature hears many arguments, but it can listen more closely when they are amplified by money.

Optometrists greased the legislative machinery with campaign contributions to all but one legislator (a physician), totaling at least $327,650 in the last two years, plus $74,000 to Beshear's re-election campaign. And if employees and spouses of optometrists were added, the total would probably be significantly more.

The optometrists and their political action committee have long been major contributors to legislative campaigns. Eakin said she didn't know if this was the first time the PAC had sent virtually every legislator a check, but “we historically have been a very active group in exercising our democratic rights.”

Such contributions must be reported, but in many cases they are only one part of quiet transactions between contributors and those who get the money — and often grant legislative favors in return. Most people involved in these transactions are probably smart enough to avoid such a quid pro quo, and in any event usually engage in a tacit conspiracy of silence about it.

Thank goodness for legislators like Democratic Rep. Susan Westrom of Lexington, who pulled back the curtain on this sometimes-sordid system. During the House committee meeting on the bill, she said an optometrist sent her an e-mail reminding her that he had given her a campaign contribution and asking her to vote for the bill.

Westrom said she was “deeply offended” and voted against the measure after unsuccessfully trying to amend it. “The optometrists have done a bang-up job getting it through,” she said.

And those, boys and girls, are the “Legislative Facts.”

Al Cross, former Courier-Journal political writer, is director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues in the School of Journalism and Telecommunications at the University of Kentucky. His e-mail address is al.cross@uky.edu. His views are his own, not those of the University of Kentucky.