How Corporations Buy Access to Your Mayor

The San Francisco-based startup AutoReturn is like Uber for car-towing. It dispatches tow trucks in cities around the country and provides logistics and management software that the company promises will reduce tow times and errors, save cities money, and provide better services to vehicle owners.

And much like Uber, AutoReturn is largely dependent on the goodwill of municipal policymakers who generally control city bureaucracies that handle towing contracts. That need for civic affection likely made the Community Leaders of America (CLA) a particularly appealing political investment.

CLA is a political action committee that works to elect Republican mayors and city officials around the U.S. It is largely funded by corporate donors such as AutoReturn, which began donating to CLA in late 2016 and has contributed nearly $28,000 since then, according to Internal Revenue Service records (data from which was gathered with assistance from the service GovPredict).

CLA’s steering committee is comprised of six mayors and four city councilmembers from around the country, including Fort Worth Mayor Betsy Price. So it was notable that in 2018, Fort Worth awarded AutoReturn a dispatch and towing contract.

There’s no evidence of any quid-pro-quo for that contract, and Price did not respond to a request for comment. AutoReturn’s CLA contribution was surely just a portion of a larger effort to ingratiate itself with policymakers in Fort Worth and elsewhere. But the contribution underscores the value of political groups such as CLA that bill themselves as forums to convene policymakers and private-sector interests. Such forums can provide valuable settings for the latter to at least make officials aware of their products, services, or policy interests—and, at times, even glean some insight on the policymaking process.

For CLA, those forums take the form of “working groups” where, according to an archived version of the group’s website, “local elected leaders and members of the private sector can partner to develop creative, unique solutions to the very challenges facing their communities." The group did not respond to questions about CLA working-group membership, topics of interest, or how donors might use them to advance their policy interests.

What is clear from public records is the financial heft of the group’s corporate supporters. Since 2014, its top three donors are tobacco giants Altria and Reynolds American and telecom leader Comcast, with big names such as General Electric, AARP, Waste Management, and AT&T near the top as well.

The access CLA provides to its corporate donors is by no means unique to the Republican side. The National Conference of Democratic Mayors, also a political organization, offers companies access to its Mayors Alliance program, which provides business and labor interests with “an opportunity to share ideas and engage with Democratic mayors in small group settings."

The NCDM has significantly hiked membership fees in its Mayors Alliance over the years. In 2012, it cost $7,500 annually to join. According to a source familiar with the membership structure, those fees now range from $10,000 to $25,000.

Neither CLA nor NCDM boasts the membership or prestige of the United States Conference of Mayors, which also offers financial supporters extensive access to its huge roster of municipal chief executives. But unlike that group, both CLA and NCDM are political organizations, meaning they can use the money provided in exchange for access to their elected official members to elect and re-elect those same officials or their allies.

That raises considerable ethical questions, says Brendan Fischer, the director of federal-reform programs at the Campaign Legal Center. “It is one thing for elected officials to learn from one another, but it is another to create a forum for the purpose of allowing lawmakers to jointly craft policy with big corporate campaign contributors,” Fischer said in an email.

The NCDM, for its part, insists it doesn’t actually craft policy, it simply connects policymakers with private interests that want to plug their businesses or pet issues. But that alone can be a valuable service. Just ask AutoReturn.

Get the data:

• IRS political action committee search
• GovPredict

Hillary Clinton has created a new nonprofit to supplement her post-2016 advocacy work, corporate records indicate.

The Onward Together Foundation was formed on June 3 by Ezra Reese, an attorney at Perkins Coie, Clinton’s longtime law firm, according to District of Columbia incorporation records. Its listed address is the same as that of Onward Together, the dark-money nonprofit that Clinton formed in 2017, and a sister political action committee, the Onward Together Committee.

A spokesperson for the former secretary of state and Democratic presidential candidate did not respond to questions about the new organization.

Public records suggest the foundation will be a 501(c)(3) arm of Clinton’s existing nonprofit, a 501(c)(4) that can legally spend on more overt political activity. During the 2018 election cycle, Onward Together steered funds to a handful of progressive and Democratic organizations. This year, it’s also rented out Clinton’s formidable email list to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

In a fundraising email sent last month, Onward Together boasted that it “brought in $12 million for progressive groups, candidates, and committees during the 2018 midterm elections.”

The new c3 arm will be far more restricted in how it can spend its money—such groups are barred altogether from spending on politics or donating to political organizations—but unlike the original Onward Together, it will be able to offer tax breaks to its donors. Politically oriented organizations that maintain c3 and c4 arms generally use the former to craft nonpartisan policy research and other products that stay within the apolitical lane that the IRS requires of such groups.

It’s not clear whether the Onward Together Foundation has yet received its tax-exempt status. The IRS database of registered charitable groups turns up no record of an organization by that name.

But the appearance of the group in D.C. corporate records indicates that Clinton plans to expand the organizational tools at her disposal headed into the 2020 campaign. As she told supporters in that fundraising email, “We’re just getting started. I can’t wait to see what else this team comes up with over the next months and years.”

Get the data:

• D.C. incorporation records
• OpenCorporates

A pair of leading firearms trade associations will hold an annual import and export policy conference at Donald Trump’s hotel in Washington, D.C. next month—right as the administration finalizes a controversial change to federal gun-trading rules for which both groups have pressed.

The National Shooting Sports Foundation and the Firearms & Ammunition Import/Export Roundtable will hold their annual Import/Export Conference at the Trump International Hotel beginning on July 30. The venue is a shift from Washington’s Grand Hyatt hotel, where the confab took place last year.

The conference is just the latest in a long line of trade-association events at Trump’s hotel, just blocks from the White House. From payday lenders to seasonal immigrant labor advocates to e-cigarette manufacturers, a wide swath of industries have patronized the Old Post Office, which last year earned Trump the second-most revenue of any of his hotels, resorts, and golf courses.

Good-government groups have argued since Trump took office that his refusal to divest from his portfolio of real-estate assets would encourage those seeking favor from the administration to patronize those properties.

NSSF, for its part, says its choice of hotel has nothing to do with any of its policy work. “We’ve had this conference in DC every year we’ve had it, this year it just happens to be at the Trump Hotel,” a spokesman said.

According to NSSF’s website, topics at past conferences have included “Export Control Reform” and the “USML-CCL transition plan.” That transition plan, on which NSSF’s lobbyists have also been working, involves a shift of authority over rules governing some firearms exports from the State Department to the Commerce Department.

The seemingly obscure change, which is close to being finalized, has drawn heated criticism from gun-control groups. A coalition of those groups warned last month that the shift “will thwart congressional oversight and create new and unacceptable risks of exacerbating gun violence, human-rights abuses, and armed conflict.”

Larry Keane, the NSSF’s top lobbyist, maintains that the change will “more efficiently [accomplish] the national-security and foreign-policy objectives of the controls” and “reduce unnecessary burdens for both the government and industry.”