CAPITOL WATCH

Legislators take care of their own

By Lance Tapley

Imagine you had missed income-tax deadlines and those nasty IRS penalties mounted up. Well, go to Congress and get an exemption passed just for you. Think that might be difficult? Maybe not if you were a member of Congress. For a similar situation involving Maine legislators, there seems to be no difficulty.

L.D.1809 is making its way through the legislature without a public hearing. It would retroactively allow six legislators and four unsuccessful candidates, who were fined as much as $32,000 for transgressions last year against the Clean Election Act, to have penalties wiped away or mitigated. The $32,000 fine applies to Representative Ronald Collins, a Wells Republican, who failed to report on time an expenditure of $2282.

“A special class of citizens,” sarcastically quips William Hain, director of the Commission on Governmental Ethics and Elections Practices, which administers the Clean Election law. “I don’t like speeding fines, either.”

The bill, sponsored by Representative John Tuttle, a Sanford Democrat, appears widely supported. The Legal and Veterans Affairs Committee gave it a unanimous ought-to-pass report. Voting was Representative Arthur Mayo, a Bath Republican, who has a $1000 late-filing penalty assessed against him.

The bill has one of the top Augusta lobbyists, Jon Doyle, who represents several penalized legislators, pushing it. Even Maine Citizens for Clean Elections, the group that successfully campaigned for the Clean Election ballot measure in 1996, supports it — which surprises Bill Hain: “The Clean Election group was adamant about the penalties at one time, but now they seem to have taken a different tact.” Recently the group has been negotiating with legislators about changes to the Clean Election law [see The Baldacci “plot,” page 1].

House Speaker Michael Saxl, a Portland Democrat, feels the penalties need to be mitigated because they are far too harsh when “you’re asking $30,000 from someone who gets $8000 a year for this 70-hour-a-week job,” he said. Saxl cited Charles LaVerdiere, Democratic Judiciary Committee chair from Wilton, who was fined $18,200 for not properly reporting $246 in expenditures.

Hain admits the ethics commission had such doubts about whether the mandatory penalties fit the offense. So much so that it sent the legislature a letter saying it might want to address this question.

Besides setting new, retroactive, more-lenient criteria for the commission to use in assessing late-filing penalties (such as “other circumstances”), the bill makes housekeeping changes to the commission.