By Mark Fischenich
Congressman Gil Gutknecht outdid most of his colleagues in accepting free trips funded by special-interest groups — traveling to Germany, Florida, Alaska, Taiwan and Arizona in the past five years, according to a database compiled by the Center for Public Integrity.
The value of the Gutknecht’s 18 trips totaled more than $44,000, putting him in the top quarter of current and former lawmakers nationally in taking trips. Members of Gutknecht’s staff also were heavy travelers — going on $67,000 worth trips funded by special interest groups for a total of $111,000 worth of travel for Gutknecht’s office.
Among the Minnesota congressional delegation, that’s second only to Sen. Norm Coleman and his staff, who took 94 trips worth more than $175,000 during the five-year period.
Gutknecht said he looks closely at who is financing all of his trips before agreeing to accept them.
“If I don’t see a conflict of interest, I do allow the group that offers to pay for it to pay for it rather than the taxpayers,” Gutknecht said.
The trips were educational, aimed at building relationships with other government officials, or involved providing his expertise on agricultural topics and prescription-drug issues to organizations that invited him to speak, he said.
Sam Stein, a spokesman for the Center for Public Integrity, said the trips are becoming another form of lobbying, but one that has even less accountability than lobbying itself.
Too often the trips are motivated by the desire of special interests to have access to lawmakers who can help them down the road, Stein said.
“The access is why they’re paying the money,” he said. “What they’re paying for is face time. They wouldn’t be investing hundreds of thousands of dollars if they didn’t think it was getting them something in return.”
Whatever the motivation of the sponsors, Gutknecht said the on-site visits help him to better understand issues that come before Congress.
“We have a motto in my office that we try to abide by,” said the 12-year veteran of the House. “... ‘Listen, learn, help and lead.’”
Valuable travels
Some of the most expensive trips taken by Gutknecht involved his membership in a working group of American lawmakers that meets annually with the legislative branch of the German government.
During 2000 to 2005, the Rochester Republican traveled to Niagara Falls, N.Y., Galveston, Texas, and Minnesota when the German lawmakers came to the United States. He visited the German cities of Berlin, Heidelberg and Frankfurt, along with Brussels, Belgium, when the Americans flew to Europe.
The overseas trips for Gutknecht, funded by the U.S. Association of Former Members of Congress, cost between $2,600 and $5,000 each. The association was founded in 1970 to promote public understanding of the role of Congress, but many of the association’s top leaders are former lawmakers now working as lobbyists in Washington, D.C. — people whose profession is to influence the laws passed by Congress.
The Congress-Bundestag seminars have been important, however, in smoothing relations between the American and German governments, said Gutknecht, especially during a time of friction between the Bush administration and top German officials.
The trips also allowed him to research prescription drug pricing as he unsuccessfully pushed legislation to ease restrictions on the importation of cheaper drugs from Canada and Europe.
“Virtually every time I travel, I go to pharmacies,” he said.
More costly than the German trip was an eight-day tour of Alaska. The $5,457 cost was covered by Arctic Power — a group funded by the Alaskan state government and oil companies that want Congress to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.
Gutknecht supported opening the wildlife refuge to the oil companies both before and after the trip.
The highest priced travel for Gutknecht was to Taipei, Taiwan, for six days in January 2003. It’s $6,870 cost was sponsored by an organization backed by Taiwanese businesses.
Gutknecht is hopeful that conversations he had there might lead to benefits for the Minnesota ethanol industry as Taiwan looks for gas additives that result in less pollution.
“I think there’s a pretty good chance they’re going to use American technology to set up ethanol in Taiwan,” he said.
Sun and sand
On the surface, many of Gutknecht’s domestic trips appear to be attractive get-aways — the sorts of excursions that well-to-do Minnesotans dip into their checking accounts to take as an annual vacation.
Several were wintertime escapes to warm places with beaches, swimming pools and golf courses.
There was a trip to West Palm Beach, Fla., in March 2003; to Aventura and Boca Raton, Fla., in January 2004; to Scottsdale, Ariz., in January 2005.
Some involve lodging and meals at luxury resorts. For instance, the Republican class first elected to Congress in 1994 traveled to the Scottsdale Princess Resort for a weekend retreat in January 2005.
While Gutknecht and other Republicans attending paid for the flight to Arizona, the Congressional Institute paid for lodging and meals at the resort — which describes itself as “a monument to beauty and luxury ... boasting one of the best spas in North America ... three award-winning restaurants, state-of-the-art meeting facilities, and two 18-hole championship golf courses.”
Gutknecht’s lodging for the three-day event cost $504 and his meals cost $1,134.
The International Dairy Foods Association, made up of manufacturers and sellers of ice cream, cheese, milk and other dairy products, financed a trip to a world-renowned resort in Boca Raton the previous January.
And in March 2003, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange paid more than $3,794 for travel, lodging, food and other costs related to Gutknecht’s five-day visit to West Palm Beach.
Resorts and relationships
“Pretty cushy trips,” said former Congressman Tim Penny of Waseca, referring to the trips taken by lawmakers in general.
Penny represented the 1st District for 12 years before retiring in 1994, the year Gutknecht was first elected.
A Democrat while in office and now a member of the Independence Party, Penny said he largely avoided privately funded trips offered to members of Congress.
“I only recall doing one,” he said, referring to a trip to Israel and the West Bank sponsored by APAC, a pro-Israel lobbying group.
Privately funded trips to posh domestic resorts are sometimes an attempt by special interests to establish connections with lawmakers that they might exploit later when they need help in Washington, Penny said.
“It’s relationships that you’re trying to build,” he said. “And it’s one way to build cozy relationships with legislators.”
But every trip to a sun-splashed luxury resort in the middle of winter wasn’t necessarily set up with a strategy of currying favor, Penny said. Sometimes, an organization really wants a lawmaker to speak to their annual conference. And thriving organizations tend to hold annual meetings in nice places.
“They’re simply going where the people are,” Penny said of lawmakers traveling to give speeches.
Other cases might be trickier to explain away, like the weekend retreat at the high-priced Scottsdale resort. It was a meeting of the Republican class of 1994, the group of then-rookie members that was part of the “Republican Revolution” that took control of the House for the first time in 40 years from an increasingly corrupt Democratic leadership.
The new Republican members promised to be reformers and to force Congress to follow the same rules that average Americans do.
In the first weeks of GOP rule, the freshmen Republicans noted that they had done away with many of the perks put in place during Democratic rule — free parking for lobbyists near the Capitol, daily delivery of ice to congressional offices, removing taxpayer subsidies for the Capitol barbershop.
On the Arizona trip, though, each of the lawmakers took $1,638 worth of lodging and food from the Congressional Institute and shared the resort with members of the institute’s board of directors.
Formed as a nonprofit educational and research organization, the Congressional Institute’s 15-member board of directors includes 13 people registered as lobbyists in Washington, D.C., according to the Center for Public Integrity.
“Do they expect a favor for setting these members up in these ostentatious settings?” wondered Stein of the Center for Public Integrity. “Who knows? But that’s one of the things that struck us at the center in putting this (database) together.”
Gutknecht said he’s never been improperly influenced on any of his trips, and each has been chosen with the goal of being a better representative of the people of southern Minnesota and of the United States.
“I and my staff and, most importantly, the constituents I represent have benefited,” he said.
