Do outgoing California legislators ‘shop’ for lobbying jobs in final weeks of the session?

But state ethics guidelines still allow voting on bills that could benefit a prospective employer. The guidelines say lawmakers can discuss — and vote on — bills that would benefit a “significant segment” of an industry. It’s only a problem if the bill deals specifically with their would-be employer.

So a lawmaker with a job pending at, say, a major tech company can continue to vote on legislation if it impacts all tech companies — and not just the one that’s going to be paying them.

No California lawmaker has been charged in recent memory with violating the rules, according to a CalMatters review.

Still, Jones-Sawyer said the risks just aren’t worth it for him as a Black man who’s visited prisons as part of his efforts to change the justice system that disproportionately penalizes men like him.

“I don’t want to be that first one,” he said.

California’s recent lobbying defections

In 2017, the Legislature changed the one-year cooling-off period rules to also prohibit lawmakers who leave office during the middle of a two-year legislative session from lobbying the Legislature while the session is ongoing — and for a year after.

The rule change happened after a couple of high-profile lobbying defections.

Kern County Democrat Michael Rubio abruptly quit the state Senate in 2013 to work for Chevron, saying he wanted to spend more time with his family. He later became a lobbyist for the oil company.

In 2015, Henry Perea, a Fresno Democrat, quit the Legislature to work for a pharmaceutical trade association. He went on to lobby for the Western States Petroleum Association.

More recently, Jim Frazier, a Fairfield Democrat, resigned in 2021 to take a job in the transportation sector after he served as chairperson of the Assembly Transportation Committee. He’s now a lobbyist for the Arc of California, a group that advocates for disabled people.

The most recent mid-term defection was Assemblymember Lorena Gonzalez, a longtime labor advocate. She left mid-session in 2022 to become the head of the California Labor Federation, one of the most influential groups in the union-friendly, Democrat-controlled Legislature.

Gonzalez never registered as a lobbyist, and she said she never needed to.

State lobbying rules say that a legislator-turned-advocate only needs to register as a lobbyist if they “spend at least one-third of his or her compensated time in a calendar month engaging in direct communication” with legislators and their staff. Gonzalez told CalMatters she doesn’t spend nearly that much time talking to her former colleagues about policy.

She said that she also made sure not to discuss specific bills with her recent colleagues during her mandatory cooling-off period.

“Legislators would call me and they’d be like, ‘Can I talk to you about this?’” she told Calmatters. “And I’m like, ‘Well, you can talk to me, but I can’t respond.’ ”

Gonzalez said that after the Labor Federation offered her a job, she knew she was going to leave the Assembly in July 2022, so she decided to resign in January of that year to avoid spending six months recusing herself on bills that she cared passionately about.

Voting rules obscure formal recusals

When lawmakers do actually recuse themselves because of a conflict of interest from a potential employer — or any other reason —  there’s no easy way for the public to determine if they did.

As CalMatters reported in multiple stories this year, lawmakers regularly stay silent when it’s time to vote on bills. Not voting counts the same as a “no” vote, and lawmakers dodge thousands of controversial votes each year to avoid accountability and avoid angering colleagues or influential lobbying organizations.

The state’s official bill-tracking website only records a non-vote as “NVR,” short for “No Vote Recorded.” It’s recorded the same if a lawmaker had an excused absence or if they recuse themselves because of a conflict of interest. That includes pending job offers.

California’s 120 legislators have recorded more than 17,000 non-votes so far this year, according to the Digital Democracy database.

The Digital Democracy database, which uses artificial intelligence to record every word spoken in legislative hearings, could only find two examples of members discussing recusing themselves from votes on bills since 2023.

Republican Sen. Roger Niello, whose family owns car dealerships in the Sacramento area, recused himself on a 2023 bill that dealt with car dealerships.

Assemblymember Joe Patterson, another Republican from the Sacramento region, recused himself from voting on a 2023 bill dealing with charging ports for portable electronic devices such as smartphones. Patterson’s wife works for Apple.

In both cases, the state’s official bill-tracking website recorded the recusals as NVRs.

Government ethics experts say Californians deserve more transparency.

They argue that the public has a right to know whether their lawmakers’ non-votes represented legitimate absences, were abstentions, or they were formal recusals due to conflicts of interests, including from pending job offers.“If they conflicted out, it should be noted,” said McMorris of California Common Cause.

Jessica Levinson, founding director of Loyola Law School’s Public Service Institute, said the public has a right to know “why their representatives aren’t weighing in.”

“Is it because they have something to do that day, because they don’t want to take a position,” she said, “or because, under the rules, they couldn’t?”

Hans Poschman and Thomas Gerrity, members of the CalMatters Digital Democracy team, contributed to this story.

Editor’s note: CalMatters staff are members of a union that’s affiliated with the California Labor Federation.