March 29, 2024

Lobbying

Ayes and Earmarks

A Washington firm has established itself as the dean of lobbyists for Florida communities. How will it - and its clients - fare if Congress reforms the way it appropriates money?

Amy Keller | 5/1/2007

Still on the Hill:
"I find now as a lobbyist I do the same kind of work I did as a member of Congress."

From the window of his eighth floor office in Arlington, Va., L.A. "Skip" Bafalis, a partner with the lobbying firm Alcalde & Fay, peers out at the nation's capital across the river, buried under a mid-February coat of ice. It's a far cry from the balmy climate of the south Florida congressional district he represented from 1973 to 1983, but he revels in the view.

Sporting a tan that makes him appear more youthful than his 77 years, Bafalis has just returned from a visit to a client, the town of Windermere, an Orlando suburb near Walt Disney World. Windermere's 2,000 residents first hired Alcalde & Fay in 2002 to help it find funding to tackle traffic congestion caused by the thousands of Orange County commuters who cut through the town every day. "We got them a rotary" and other traffic-slowing measures -- a total of $750,000 in federal funding, Bafalis says. Over the past five years, the town also garnered $200,000 for its storm water management plan and another $240,000 for bicycle and pedestrian path improvements -- in all, a 313% return on the $380,000 in lobbying fees it paid Alcalde & Fay.

Founded in 1973, the firm has established itself as the dean of lobbyists for Florida communities of all sizes, ranging from Windermere, to Treasure Island, a beachfront town in Pinellas County with a population of 7,500, to Miami-Dade County, with its 2.4 million residents. Last year alone, the firm took in more than $3 million from 45 Florida towns, cities, counties and school boards -- all eager to pay at least $5,000 a month in fees in exchange for more generous slivers of the federal pie.

Many feel it's money well spent. During the nine years that Alcalde & Fay has represented it, Clearwater has received more than $47 million in federal funding. Homestead, which has paid Alcalde & Fay $237,000 in lobbying fees since 2003, has been awarded $9.9 million for various projects -- a return of $41.77 on every dollar it spent with the firm.

Hendry County attorney Mark Lapp says the firm is "doing a good job" helping the county compete for funding in Washington. Most recently, the county got $800,000 in additional funding for State Road 80 that it didn't expect otherwise, Lapp says. "We thanked Congressman (Tim) Mahoney for that. I don't know how much the lobbying firm had to do with that, but even if they didn't have anything to do with getting that money, they're keeping us in the loop."
For Bafalis, it's like he never left office. "I find now as a lobbyist I do the same kind of work I did as a member of Congress -- and I'm proud of it."

No Pork:
" Do we really think it's appropriate for the federal government to renovate municipal swimming pools?"

Budgeteering

Alcalde & Fay's ability to deliver stems in part from the explosion in the practice of "earmarking," a sleight-of-hand move that members of Congress use to circumvent the traditional appropriations process. Bypassing congressional committees and other review, the lawmakers slip line items with funding for specific projects into larger spending bills. The bills rarely identify the legislators who sponsored the earmarks, which are often tacked on at the last minute without debate and without input from the relevant executive branch agencies that will administer the funding.

While both public entities and private companies chase earmarks, lawmakers are more likely to insert funding for public projects because the spending will have visible results for which they can take credit.

When it begins working with a client, Alcalde & Fay helps municipal officials draw up a wish list of projects. The lobbying team advises the locals about which projects have a better chance of success and what level of funding they can expect given the federal budget. Local government officials then finalize the city's requests in a letter, which it typically forwards to members of Florida's congressional delegation by mid-February, when the appropriations process in Washington begins to heat up. As Congress assembles its spending bills in late spring, the lobbyists continue to work their connections on Capitol Hill to advocate for their clients' projects.

Firm founder Hector Alcalde, who has mostly retired from day-to-day lobbying, says the 35 members of his firm are simply "good technicians" with a "pretty good understanding of the process."

Connections help, too. The firm has close ties to Florida's congressional delegation. Bafalis crows about U.S. Rep. Bill Young's support of his clients. "He's been spectacular. He's done wonders for the Port of Tampa."

Some of the firm's other lobbyists have experience in the military, executive branch agencies and the White House. And they are active participants in Washington's campaign fund-raising circuit, contributing $98,000 in campaign contributions to federal candidates during the 2006 election cycle.

No Pork:
" Do we really think it's appropriate for the federal government to renovate municipal swimming pools?"

A bad light

The trouble with earmarks, say critics like Ron Utt, is that they subvert responsible budgeting and lead to outrageous amounts of "pork barrel" spending that provides no benefit to the vast majority of Americans. "Do we really think it's appropriate for the federal government to renovate municipal swimming pools? Is this a national priority? Is this something people in Washington should fuss with? My thought is no ... yet this is what we do with earmarks," complains Utt, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation who has pointedly criticized Alcalde & Fay's work on occasion.

Utt says the proliferation of earmarks is a relatively recent phenomenon, despite protests from lawmakers who "pretend that the Congresses have been doing this forever. That simply isn't true." Between 1970 and 1985, Utt points out, there were an average of three earmarks in Congress' annual transportation appropriation. Today, a transportation spending bill will be littered with anywhere from 900 to 1,200 add-ons, he says.

Experts on the legislative process trace the explosion to the Republican takeover of Congress in the mid-1990s, when GOP leaders discovered that steering projects to vulnerable lawmakers' districts could help keep them in office. Between 1998 and 2003, more than 1,400 local governments spent in excess of $343 million lobbying the federal government, according to a tally by the Center for Public Integrity.

Recent scandals in Washington have at least temporarily slowed the business of earmarking, however. In 2005, Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-Calif.), a member of the House Appropriations Committee, was sent to prison for trading millions of dollars worth of earmarked defense contracts to companies for favors and cash. Lobbyist Jack Abramoff pleaded guilty to bribing public officials and defrauding his Indian tribe clients out of millions of dollars.

Those cases prompted Democratic leaders to announce in December a moratorium on earmarks until Congress enacts reforms. More recently, appropriators have said they intend to fund half the number of earmarks in fiscal year 2008 that they did in 2007. In early 2007, the House and Senate passed new rules that will require lawmakers to attach their name to requested earmarks and disclose who will benefit from the projects they fund. The lawmakers also must certify that they have no financial interest in the projects they seek to fund, and the earmarks must be posted on the internet 48 hours before the bills in which they are inserted are voted on.

Legislation with broader ethics and lobbying reforms is still pending, but Influence, a Legal Times publication that follows the federal lobbying industry, predicts the new disclosure rules alone will make it harder for towns and cities to lobby for pet projects because lawmakers who sponsor them will be subjected to more scrutiny.

Alcalde & Fay, meanwhile, takes the position that its industry is suffering because of the actions of a few bad apples. It rejects the notion that earmarks are secretive, with Alcalde saying it's clear what kind of projects cities and counties are seeking. Bafalis says he welcomes more "transparency" in the earmarking process but fears that public projects will get short shrift. "There is a clear distinction between earmarks for public clients and those for corporate clients," says Bafalis.

More troublesome, he says, is the prospect that executive branch bureaucrats will end up making decisions about where to spend money. "If Congress doesn't earmark it, (the money) goes to the agency, and some bureaucrat will decide" where the money goes.

However cloudy the future of earmarks, plenty of firms are pursuing the municipal clients that have been Alcalde & Fay's bread and butter. Patton Boggs, The Ferguson Group, Holland & Knight, Tew Cardenas and The Jefferson Group are among those seeking to represent Florida cities and towns. Valerie Gelnovatch, a principal with The Ferguson Group, which has six Florida clients including Broward County and Palm Bay, says her firm is trying to "steadily" grow its representation of Florida municipalities by adding about two or three clients a year. "One firm shouldn't do the whole state," she says. "There's only so many clients that you should have in one congressional member's district. More than two, I would say, it could result in a conflict of interest."

Alcalde seems unfazed. There's plenty of business to go around, he says, and his firm has staying power. "We've got a lot of competitors, but we've been around longer."

Satisfied Customers?
WEB EXCLUSIVE: To hear Jupiter town officials debate the merits of hiring Alcalde & Fay to lobby for the town, go to FloridaTrend.com/Extra.

Tags: Politics & Law, North Central, Government/Politics & Law

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