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Ethics Commission examines campaign software dilemma

BY KIT WAGAR The Kansas City Star Date: 03/14/00 22:15

JEFFERSON CITY -- The two major candidates for Missouri governor have raised almost $7 million to fuel their campaigns, but you won't find contributors' names on the Internet any time soon, state officials confirmed Tuesday.

The campaign-reporting software that the state paid for in 1997 still does not work, and the Missouri Ethics Commission is looking at other ways to get the information onto the World Wide Web.

"The vendor continues to be cooperative, but I don't see us making headway with that company," executive director Chuck Lamb told the commission.

The statement was the closest Lamb had come to declaring the project a failure. But Lamb said later that he had no deadline in mind for when the state might cancel its contract with the software developer, SDR Technologies Inc. of Westlake Village, Calif.

One factor that may hasten that decision is the increasing obsolescence of SDR's software.

The Ethics Commission contracted with SDR almost three years ago to provide two software packages. The first would let candidates file campaign finance reports by computer. The second would let lobbyists use a computer to report the gifts they give to lawmakers and other spending to influence legislation.

State law required the Ethics Commission to post lobbyist spending reports and campaign reports filed by statewide candidates on the Internet by January 1998. But the software packages, which cost the state more than $500,000 plus a $5,000-a-month maintenance fee, have been plagued with problems from the beginning.

After two years of trying to fix the glitches, the campaign-finance software was supposed to be ready last January. But continued problems forced the commission to delay use of the system at least until the next quarterly filing, which is next month.

But the six-member Ethics Commission must certify that the software works before candidates are required to use it. The commission took no action at Tuesday's meeting after hearing that the software continued to misfire.

In addition, the terms of half the commissioners expire today, and their successors have not been appointed.

Until the electronic system works, candidates continue to file their campaign-spending reports on paper at the commission's office in Jefferson City. The reports are often hundreds of pages long and cannot be analyzed as easily as if they were computerized. But the situation is even worse on the lobbyist side.

Lobbyists are filing their reports electronically. But the database into which the information goes is so filled with glitches that the public actually has less access than when the reports were filed on paper.

The database is accessible only on staff computers and lists of gifts cannot be printed out, so copies are not available. Some expenditures that lobbyists report don't show up in the database. And the system is prone to crashing, staff members said.

On the campaign-finance side, however, there are two glimmers of hope. Brian Hess, ethics' new computer manager, said he is trying to salvage the parts of the SDR system that work by integrating them with new software tools.

Joe Carroll, director of campaign reporting, said he has been working on a Web-based reporting system with programmers from Amgraf Inc., a Kansas City company that has a contract to put state forms on the Internet.

Campaign committees can download all 20 campaign reporting forms used in Missouri. The committee treasurer can fill them out on the computer, then print them so they can be mailed to the commission.

With some additional programing, the state should be able to let candidates fill out forms online and send them to the commission by e-mail, Carroll said. The information would flow into a database that could then be placed on the commission Web site, he said.

Because Amgraf has done the work under an existing state contract, Carroll said, the system hasn't cost the Ethics Commission a cent.

To reach Kit Wagar, call (816) 234-4440 or send e-mail to kwagar@kcstar.com

All content ) 1998 The Kansas City Star

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