Michigan ranks last in laws on ethics, transparency

LANSING — Michigan ranks last in a national study of state ethics and transparency laws and safeguards, set for release today,  partly due to its weak public records law and an absence of laws requiring personal financial disclosures by lawmakers and top state officials.

In all, 11 states received failing grades of F in the study, but Michigan's rating was last in the study by the Center for Public Integrity and Global Integrity, two nonprofit organizations that promote government transparency and ethics.

Michigan scored 50.5 points out of a possible 100. The other 10 states that received an F were: Wyoming, with 50.9; Delaware, with 55.5; South Dakota, with 55.9; Nevada, with 57.1; Pennsylvania, with 57.9; Oregon with 57.9; Maine, with 58.6; Kansas, with 58.6; Louisiana, with 58.8; and Oklahoma, with 59.

"What you see across the board is just a lack of some of those accountability and transparency laws and practices that some states have enacted," Nicholas Kusnetz, the project director, told the Free Press on Friday.

Michigan's worst--in-the-nation ranking doesn't mean Michigan is the most corrupt state. The score doesn't speak to the level of corruption in Michigan, since that's not what's being measured, Kusnetz said. Instead, the study looks at what laws are in place and how those laws are implemented, in order to assess the systems intended to prevent corruption and expose it when it does occur.

The center has modified its criteria since that first study, which in itself could affect a change in the rankings.

But Michigan, which already had a distinction as one of only two states where both the governor and the Legislature are exempted from state open records laws, has moved backward since 2012 in at least one respect.

In 2013, Gov. Rick Snyder signed into law Senate Bill 661, which among other changes enshrined into state law the anonymity of donors who pay for campaign "issue ads" that may praise or criticize candidates for elected office but don't expressly advocate how people should vote. Such ads have proliferated in recent years as part of the growth in the influence of "dark money" on political campaigns.

Wording was added to the bill to keep the donors secret just hours after Secretary of State Ruth Johnson, who, like Snyder, is a Republican, announced she would seek changes to administrative rules that would require the identify of such donors to be publicly disclosed.

Snyder, who said he favored disclosure of issue ad donor during his first campaign for governor in 2010, argued the bill increased overall transparency by requiring that disclaimers identifying sponsors be included with automated telephone calls, known as robocalls, and other political ads. But campaign finance reform advocates said those changes were minor when compared to the legalizing of dark money under state law.

"That was certainly a move in the wrong direction," said Rich Robinson, executive director of the Michigan Campaign Finance Network, a watchdog organization based in Lansing. "I'm well aware of how bad disclosure is on campaign finance." As for reporting required by lobbyists, state law is "bad and hasn't improved," he said.

Not everyone agrees SB 661 was a step backward.

"Everyone should have a right to speak out on issues; if they want to do it anonymously, that's their right as well," said Steve Linder, a partner in the Sterling Corp., a Lansing-based Republican consulting firm that was instrumental in amending the bill to keep the identify of issue ad donors secret. Issue ads, he said, are not anonymous, but sponsored by corporations that have to register and make certain disclosures with the Internal Revenue Service.

On campaign disclosure issues, groups such as the Center for Public Integrity share an agenda "to shame and intimidate people so they will be chilled from participating in democracy," Linder said.

The Center for Public Integrity study also noted that Michigan has no laws requiring public financial disclosures by elected officials or top bureaucrats and no "revolving door" legislation that prevents lawmakers or top officials from going to work for corporations that were in a position to benefit from their official actions.

Of the 245 "corruption risk indicators" in 13 categories examined in the study, Michigan ranked last for laws and systems related to executive accountability, legislative accountability, judicial accountability and management of pension funds.

Michigan also received grades of F, but did not get ranked last in the nation, in categories related to public access to information, political finance, civil service oversight, procurement, lobbying oversight and ethics oversight.

Only in the areas of election oversight and the state budgeting process did Michigan perform well. The state ranked fifth and eighth in those two areas, respectively.

Sara Wurfel, a spokeswoman for Snyder, said she was surprised by Michigan's low ranking.

"I think many would be hard pressed to find other elected officials who have implemented more transparency and accountability projects," from dashboards featuring metrics for each department to creation of a citizen's guide to how state and local governments spend money, Wurfel said.

She pointed to a 2013 report by the Public Interest Research Group in Michigan that gave the state an A- and said Michigan had made "great progress" in the area of transparency in government spending reporting.

"We’re always focusing on continuous quality improvement," attempting to make Michigan a leader in transparency and ethics, she said.

No state was graded higher than the C that Alaska was awarded in the study. The two other top states were California and Connecticut, which each received a C-.

There could be a silver lining to Michigan's last-place ranking.

In the 2012 study, it was Georgia that ranked 50th. Kusnetz said good government groups there used the poor performance to amplify their ongoing push for reforms. The result was a modest law the following year that created a $75 cap on the value of lobbyists’ gifts to public officials,he said. The change helped boost the state’s score in the category of legislative accountability to a C-, sixth best in the nation, though Georgia still scored a D- overall.

There are bills before the Legislature to include the governor's office and state lawmakers in the Michigan Freedom of Information Act and require the filing of financial disclosure reports by lawmakers.

A bill sponsored by Rep. Jeff Irwin, D-Ann Arbor, would address "pay to play" issues by limiting the awarding of state contracts to campaign donors, Irwin said.

"I don't think of Michigan as having a corrupt political climate, but I do think we have some amazing holes in our law that invite abuse," Irwin said.

As it may have done in Georgia, could embarrassment with Michigan's performance lead to changes here as well?

"No one wants to be last," said Kusnetz, who declined to make a prediction.

Robinson said he was not hopeful.

"I've never seen any indication that shame still exists in the Michigan Legislature," and "the governor has always talked a better game than he has executed," he said.

Contact Paul Egan: 517-372-8660 or pegan@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @paulegan4.