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Paid political consultant bill gets through conference committee with new language

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. – After some clarifications on certain parts of legislation, one of the House’s ethics bills passed early in the session took yet another step towards Gov. Jay Nixon’s desk.

HB 1983, sponsored by Rep. Shamed Dogan, R-Ballwin, has new language designed to clarify and better represent the intentions of the General Assembly after a conference committee met Monday. While the language is meant to assuage members of both chambers.

The committee, comprised of members of both the House and Senate, approved of adding the Senate’s amendments to the legislation with some slight, but impactful, alterations. While the first amendment dealt with a small enough change as to not warrant much discussion, the other two did.

One of those amendments would redefine a paid political consultant as a person paid for profit instead of just being paid. Dogan noted that the difference was important  “so that you could still be reimbursed for expense that you incur in campaigning.”

“And then the third change we made was making sure people are still able to provide tangible goods,” Dogan continued. “So if they do yard signs or buttons or something like that for campaigns, but it’s not an ordinary course of their business, that they are still allowed to do that.”

That change would exclude an elected official who runs a printing business to making political posters or yard signs as a small part of their business from being considered paid political consultants. The new language of that last amendment caused a great deal of debate in the committee between slightly altering the Senate language, reverting to the House language or creating fairly new language.

Rep. Gina Mitten, D-St. Louis, had concerns at first that the Senate amendment, written by Dr. Bob Onder, R-St. Charles, was too vague, especially regarding the phrase “in the ordinary course of the vendor’s business.” She also had reservations regarding the House language.

“How do you know that, how do you enforce that?” she asked. “Why not just put a percentage if that’s what we’re talking about?”

The final agreement came by deleting services and instead focusing on goods created by these types of businesses.

Onder noted that in the other lobbying reform bills crafted by the General Assembly “most of the justifiable exceptions have had to do with goods, not services,” so that course of action seemed consistent with what the body has worked towards the past two months.

The legislation will now be redrafted with those changes, and go through the House and Senate one more time when the floor leaders decide that debate should occur, though Dogan was unsure when that would take place, especially with budget bills taking up much of the coming week’s debate.

But even as the General Assembly moves into the latter half of the session, Dogan is confident the bill will make it to the governor’s desk without much more delay.

“I’m pleased with where we are, and I’m hopeful we can get it through the process with the time we have remaining on the calendar,” Dogan said.