Posted on: Monday, May 6, 2002

EDITORIAL
Donations ban will cut political favoritism

What if you made a hefty political contribution to someone's campaign and didn't win any contracts thereafter?

Those big-time donors accustomed to landing government jobs might not like it.

But any effort to remove incentives to curry favor via political contributions gets our vote. Such deterrents are a critical linchpin of campaign finance reform.

So we applaud the passage of a Senate bill that caps a company's or union's total donations to all state and county candidates during a two-year election period to less than $6,000, and bans the state and counties from awarding government contracts to any company or person who made a political contribution in the previous two years.

It's a pity about a gaping loophole in the bill that allows corporations to contribute an unlimited amount of company money to political action committees, which in turn can contribute to campaigns. But the word is, the measure wouldn't have passed without it.

Once both politicians and contributing companies have had a little experience in living with this first-step law, we'd bet they would be more than willing to take the next step and do away with soft money contributions, as they have in Washington.

The only reason to resist such change would be if there were a nexus between giving and winning contributions that the two sides are not willing to break.

We also applaud City Councilman John Henry Felix for introducing a backup bill at the county level that would bar anyone who has made a contribution to the incumbent mayor or mayor's campaign committee in the two preceding years from receiving a nonbid contract from the city.

Apparently, this is part of the council's effort to cleanse its tarnished reputation in the wake of a series of scandals involving council members.

Whether it's at the state or county level, it's abundantly clear that tough restrictions on political contributions are necessary because campaign spending laws are too squishy and the penalties for breaking them too light.

Remember the case of Geolabs-Hawai'i, which was fined a record-breaking $64,000 for making $124,000 worth of excessive political donations to Gov. Ben Cayetano, Mayor Jeremy Harris, Lt. Gov. Mazie Hirono, Maui Mayor James "Kimo" Apana and more.

The engineering firm has landed $660,000 worth of non-bid contracts from the Harris administration alone since 1998, winning consulting jobs on other major state projects, such as the H-3 Freeway and the Maui state airport.

You do the math.