Good first step in regulating in-kind donations

FOR YEARS, elected officials have been told that when someone gives them a free flight, they should report its value based on what it could cost them to buy a ticket on a commercial flight rather than what it cost the donor to provide the flight.

It was an absurd approach, as Charleston’s Post and Courier demonstrated by reviewing Gov. Nikki Haley’s free flights: One private flight that the governor said was worth $1,400 would have cost $35,000 if she had booked a private flight. That’s not very different from claiming the value of a dinner at a five-star restaurant as the cost of a stop at the McDonald’s drive-through since both provide the necessary calories for that meal.

Fortunately, that’s all changed. After questions were raised about the governor’s frequent-flyer program (she accepted 54 free flights in less than a year, 17 from people with potential business before the state), the State Ethics Commission voted unanimously to require future flight values to be calculated based on the cost to the donor.

Although the commission might just as easily have said the value should be reported as the much higher amount it would cost to charter a private plane, this is a reasonable standard. And we applaud the willingness of the State Ethics Commission to admit that the way things had been done in the past didn’t make any sense; Director Herb Hayden decided on his own to propose a new standard after he learned of the guidance some of his staff had been giving.

The new standard, which appropriately will not apply to flights Gov. Haley already has taken, is important because the most that donors can contribute in cash or in-kind services is $3,500 to statewide candidates and $1,000 to legislative and local candidates. The ruling means that the governor will have to either accept fewer free flights or else start paying part of the cost out of her campaign account.

There probably aren’t many candidates outside the governor’s race who get offered free flights, but if the logic behind the ruling is applied more broadly — and it absolutely should be — it could affect nearly every political campaign in the state, because most serious candidates receive some sort of in-kind donations.

Essentially, the ruling flipped the perspective, saying that rather than what it’s worth to the politician, the value of an in-kind contribution should be reported as what it cost the donor. If candidates don’t want to have to count all those goods and services they don’t use or don’t need, they’re perfectly free to tell donors they only want cash.

Unfortunately, the rule won’t affect all the flights and other goods and services that politicians accept as “gifts” rather than campaign donations, because the law allows people to make unlimited donations for public officials’ personal use, so long as they’re reported.

That law, long overdue for an overhaul, flies in the face not only of commonsense but of a key provision of the 1991 ethics reforms, which sought to limit personal logrolling by prohibiting candidates from converting campaign donations to their personal use. The Ethics Commission can’t do anything to fix that problem, but the Legislature can. And it should.