After Congress tightened rules on member travel funded by private groups in late 1995, Gannett News Service decided to check if the new rules had made a difference. 'We wanted to assess how much travel members of Congress and their staffs have taken from private groups with a stake in Capitol Hill legislation,' said GNS special projects editor David Milliron. The result was a GNS special report titled 'Congress: Have invitation, will travel.' The special report, which ran predominantly in many of Gannett's 91 daily newspapers in November, included an overall analysis and story on congressional travel, along with stories detailing which special interests paid the highest travel tabs, which destinations were most common, which committees traveled most frequently, and which Congressional spouses earned the most frequent flyer miles.

The new rules require members of Congress and their staffs to explain how such travel relates to their work and to disclose its sponsor, destination, cost and purpose within 30 days.The GNS database investigation found that private industry and non-profit groups spent nearly $8 million in 16 months on 5,100 trips. Other key findings included: China was the hottest congressional travel destination; the Nuclear Energy Institute spent $123,000 on congressional travel while lobbying to send radioactive waste to Nevada during 1996-97; the tobacco industry spent $70,000 on 27 trips for congressmen during the same period; and the House Commerce Committee, which oversees telecommunications and electricity deregulation, topped the list of well-traveled congressional committees, taking nearly 200 paid trips in 16 months.

GNS chief political correspondent Chuck Raasch and regional correspondent Fredreka Schouten, together with Milliron, spent three months on the project. They collected the paper records on the more than 5,100 trips between January 1996 - when the new reporting requirements kicked in and early May 1997. The data from the reports was then keypunched by two interns into six Borland Paradox databases. Milliron said The Center for Responsive Politics subsequently keypunched the 1997 travel records, which are now available on its Website.

'I was pleased to see they picked up on this. We feel this is an important thing for the public to know,' Raasch said. 'This is the type of information Congress doesn't want in electronic form because it's too easy to see patterns among trips when it's in a computer database,' Milliron said. Milliron explained there were a few pitfalls during the project. Because the majority of the reports were handwritten, GNS had to painstakingly decipher the name of each traveler on the forms using various congressional directories.

And many of the travel records identified sponsors not by company names but by acronyms, requiring additional research. Raasch said members of Congress also did a poor job of filling out the forms. Often, writing was illegible or total expenses (including transportation, lodging, meals) were added incorrectly. And in one instance, Milliron said, House Speaker Newt Gingrich reported the cost of his trip in Swiss francs, which GNS converted to U.S.

dollars using the exchange rate at the dates of his trip. 'If that's not trying to abate the system, I don't know what is,' Milliron said. Included in the database were the trip sponsors, names of travelers, destinations and the cost and dates of travel. GNS created a separate database for travel related to committee work. Once the analysis was complete for the national package, Milliron worked with the bureau's regional reporters, who wrote about three dozen stories on the travels of elected representatives serving their regions.

Overall, Raasch said they were happy with the play the series received. 'As we tried to point out, there are a lot of new ways or different ways for money to get into this process,' Raasch said.