Welcome to Pay Dirt—exclusive reporting and research from The Daily Beast’s Lachlan Markay on corruption, campaign finance, and influence-peddling in the nation’s capital. For Beast Inside members only.
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For CLA, those forums take the form of “working groups” where, according to an archived version of the group’s website, “local elected leaders and members of the private sector can partner to develop creative, unique solutions to the very challenges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.
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