‘These Bad ALEC Bills’ Savaged at Free Press Meeting

"There was a recent major victory against ALEC,” said Free Press Senior Director of Strategy Tim Karr during a panel. “The language of the bill was cut and paste from the ALEC playbook.” He called Georgia an “unlikely” place to feature this triumph and said it ended “a stream” of ALEC victories, with the bill “crushed” in a decisive House vote. More than a dozen states have passed laws restricting municipal networks, “largely the result of ALEC’s efforts,” Karr contended.

"This is another example of Free Press throwing mud rather than talking serious policy,” John Stephenson, director of ALEC’s Communications and Technology Task Force, told us. “It was not our bill.”

ALEC has opposed municipal networks but has consistently denied that the Georgia bill is its work. Stephenson told us on multiple occasions that the bill differed from ALEC’s model legislation on municipal networks, which has been introduced in other states for years. The Georgia bill proposed municipalities could only build networks if the region lacked a certain low threshold of broadband speed and called for coordinating any builds through the Georgia Public Service Commission, a different approach than ALEC’s model Municipal Telecommunications Private Industry Safeguards Act (http://bit.ly/12urkdB). Stephenson has briefed some Georgia legislators but played little active role in pushing House Bill 282, he said. Stephenson praised the Georgia bill’s sensibilities but disavowed the methods. Windstream, a major backer of the Georgia bill, is not an ALEC member, and Windstream Senior Vice President Eric Einhorn said he didn’t initially recognize the acronym of ALEC or know of any council involvement when questioned in February (CD Feb 21 p11). Two of the Republican House legislators pushing the bill, Reps. Mark Hamilton and Don Parsons, have received ALEC scholarship dollars, however, which Karr contended on the panel and at length in a March 12 Huffington Post op-ed (http://huff.to/16IzugY). Stephenson declined to comment on the legislators’ ALEC membership status. Parsons told us he’s an ALEC member and that he believes Hamilton, who could not be reached for comment, is as well. “I just thought it was a good piece of legislation,” Parsons said of House Bill 282. Many communications companies, including AT&T, Verizon and Time Warner Cable, belong to ALEC, although Sprint Nextel dropped out last year.

"The more people learn about these bad ALEC bills, the less likely they are to succeed,” Karr said, describing the phone calls to legislators from activists around Georgia and the work of the Georgia Municipal Association. He detailed the speech of Hamilton, the Republican sponsor of the legislation, before its final vote. Hamilton framed it as a free market philosophical question, a “common refrain of those opposing municipal networks,” Karr said. “The free market rhetoric in Georgia in this case didn’t work.” All telcos receive significant assistance from the government, he added.

Karr called ALEC bills “insidious” and said the telecom ones are recently receiving more attention: “We're now starting to focus more intensely on this work as well.”

On the broader ALEC operation, Lisa Graves, executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy, criticized “unelected corporate lobbyists voting as equals” in secret at these ALEC meetings. Its model legislation is crafted with private and public members and until recently, remained secret. Graves has posted several hundred leaked model bills online and helped launch a campaign against the council: Past observers “didn’t know how to connect the dots because the bills were secret,” she said. “When you Google ALEC, Alec Baldwin is no longer at the top."

ALEC officials questioned the thrust of the Free Press panelists. “They rack up a lot of frequent flyer miles spreading disinformation,” ALEC spokesman Bill Meierling told us. “We're a table at which people exchange ideas.” ALEC is not “sinister” or “dark,” Meierling said, disputing the characterizations. The campaigns of recent years have made it “difficult to engage” with state lawmakers, he said.

Nearly three dozen corporations have left ALEC, panelists said. “ALEC has done a lot to try to change their PR,” to the group’s credit after recent critiques, said Rashad Robinson, executive director of Color of Change. Robinson was active in pressuring corporations to leave and described his strategy. The country has to clean up after the damage of many ALEC bills that have passed into law, Robinson said. He slammed ALEC’s “shady backroom strategies” and said the council receives 98 percent of its funding from corporations.

That claim is a “straight up lie,” Meierling said, referring to the organization’s “diverse” funding, but declining to specify the exact breakdown. Some members have left but “many have returned,” Meierling said, saying many challenges of the past couple of years have been largely resolved. ALEC has made strides toward transparency, such as posting its model legislation online, he said. “It is a legislator-controlled organization, bottom line,” Stephenson said. “There is no way any one sector can dominate the task force.”

"Not only have corporations left ALEC but legislators are now leaving ALEC,” said Common Cause President Bob Edgar. “Money is corroding our system. ... Nothing comes out of those task forces that doesn’t get approved by those corporations.” The council provides many “scholarships” for legislators to attend ALEC meetings, which he said amounts to “stealth lobbying” even though the group registers as a nonprofit. Edgar has filed a complaint with the Internal Revenue Service on ALEC’s status and predicted all corporations that stayed with ALEC and its contributors will be fined and penalized when the IRS delivers its verdict in coming months. ALEC sees the complaint as “largely resolved” and maintains its status as an educational nonprofit, Meierling said. State residents should go to their legislators and express disappointment in ALEC memberships, Edgar advised. The Communications Workers of America stepped up to work with Common Cause on the issue after the 2010 election when labor issues were heavily under debate, he said of the ALEC fight. “They're really out to corporatize democracy.”

Stephenson, however, still receives invitations to testify before state legislatures and doesn’t see ALEC’s influence waning at all, he said.