{ "id": "2001-julyaugust-legislator-gifts", "slug": "2001-julyaugust-legislator-gifts", "url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2001-julyaugust-legislator-gifts.html", "year": 2001, "month": "July/August", "monthNum": 7, "headline": "Legislator gifts", "kicker": "STUDENTS", "author_name": "Robb Crocker", "author_title": "Legislative reporting student", "affiliation": "Virginia Commonwealth University", "summary": "Virginia Commonwealth University journalism students analyzed state legislator gift disclosures and found lawmakers received approximately $118,000 in gifts from special interests, creating a searchable database and writing stories that raised ethical questions about potential conflicts of interest.", "keywords": [ "gifts", "legislators", "database" ], "topics": [ "Government & Politics", "Investigative Methods", "Data & Databases" ], "technologies": [ "Excel" ], "full_text": "Legislative reporting students at Virginia Commonwealth University took a close look this spring at the gifts state legislators receive. We found that Virginia's lawmakers got about $118,000 in gifts last year from special interests.\n\nAdd in the gifts to the governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general, and the haul totaled almost $185,000.\n\nThe 13 students in the class, myself included, culled the information from the conflict-of-interest forms state officials filed in January. We entered the information into a spreadsheet so we could analyze it and identify the biggest givers and recipients.\n\nOnline searchable database\n\nWe wrote more than a dozen stories and put them online - along with a searchable database detailing the gifts reported by each legislator. We highlighted the biggest gifts including trips to hunt caribou in the Arctic Circle and quail in Georgia. And we raised ethical questions: Should lawmakers be accepting such freebies from businesses, interest groups and lobbyists seeking to influence the legislative process?\n\nThe project drew an enthusiastic response. AP picked it up, and we received several complimentary e-mails - especially from citizens thanking us for putting the records online.\n\nFocus on General Assembly\n\nWe initially focused on the 140 members of the General Assembly. The project involved the following steps:\n\nWe obtained the forms, called Statements of Economic Interests, from the clerks of the House and Senate.\n\nEach student was given the conflict-of-interest forms for 10 legislators. (Jeff South, who teaches the course, also took a batch of 10 forms.)\n\nWe entered the information for each legislator into Excel. For every gift, we recorded the description, the value, the giver's name and city and the recipient.\n\nUsing cut-and-paste, we combined the data from each student into one large spreadsheet.\n\nWe cleaned the data a bit - especially to standardize the names of givers. (The state's major utility company, for example, had been entered several ways: as Virginia Power, VA Power, Dominion Power, Dominion Resources and other variations.)\n\nWe analyzed the data, using Excel's PivotTable Report feature to subtotal it by givers and by recipients.\n\nWe highlighted the biggest gifts - including trips to hunt caribou in the Arctic Circle and quail in Georgia.\n\nThe class held a brainstorming session to generate story ideas. Some students decided to profile the most generous gift-givers - like Philip Morris, which gave legislators nearly $26,000 in trips, meals and other gifts. Other students chose to profile the top recipients. One student offered to write about quirky gifts, like WWF tickets; another, about legislators who refuse all gifts. One student decided to investigate the gifts received by Gov. Jim Gilmore, Lt. Gov. John Hager (who presides over the Senate) and Attorney General Mark Earley. As we did with the legislative gifts, the class combined forces to input the gifts records for Virginia's top state officials.\n\nFor our individual stories, we each did additional reporting, interviewing officials and tracking down more records. Then we started writing.\n\nThe stories were later published at http:// During the legislative session, we used the site to report on the daily happenings at the General Assembly.\n\nLearning spreadsheets\n\nAs a participant in the project, I learned quite a few skills that I plan to utilize in the future. First, I learned how to compile data into a spreadsheet - and why that's important: All told, we needed to tally up about 1,000 gifts, and you can't do that in your head. Excel helped us \"interview\" the data so we could discover things that weren't obvious, like the average haul in gifts for male legislators ($912) versus female legislators ($441).\n\nIn addition, I got my first exposure to working as part of a large group on a big project. That takes collaboration and teamwork. If any member of the group screwed up - made errors inputting data, for instance - it would undermine all our work. So reliability and attention to detail were critical.\n\nAs a participant in the project, I learned quite a few skills that I plan to utilize in the future.\n\nI was honestly surprised at what our class found, and at the public's response. I think people are interested in gifts to politicians for several reasons:\n\nMany gifts have a cachet that campaign donations don't. A lobbyist may get more bang for the buck with a $100 steak dinner than with a $100, or even $1,000, check to a campaign committee. In Virginia, where $5,000 campaign contributions are pretty common, an interest group could spend less money but make a bigger impression by sending a key legislator on a vacation.\n\nGifts often guarantee face time with lawmakers - giving lobbyists an opportunity to state their case for or against legislation. We found that legislators received $26,000 in meals and $24,000 in trips, with lobbyists usually serving as hosts.\n\nConstituents may view certain gifts more suspiciously than campaign contributions. People might sympathize with politicians' need for money to run for office. But they might think it's grubby for Virginia lawmakers to accept free Washington Redskins tickets, golf equipment and eyeglasses - things ordinary folks must buy.\n\nThe rules governing gifts may be looser than the rules on campaign donations. In Virginia, lawmakers cannot accept campaign contributions during the legislative session - but they can accept gifts any time. (Virginia has no limits on the amount or size of gifts or campaign donations legislators can receive. Steve Calos, executive director of Common Cause of Virginia, describes the state as the \"Cayman Islands\" of campaign finance.)\n\nCampaign donations often are online (in Virginia, thanks to the Virginia Public Access Project www.vpap.org). Not so for gifts; those records had been available only on paper in Richmond. Our project made the gifts data available to the public for the first time over the Internet.\n\nComparing regions\n\nMy story compared the regions of Virginia and the amount of money legislators received. To do this, I split the state into five regions: northern, eastern, central, southwest and western. Next, I determined which legislators go where, using Excel to tally my results.\n\nI found that legislators from Eastern Virginia - including Norfolk and Virginia Beach - received the most overall gift money and had the highest average per legislator. They were followed by the legislators from central and Northern Virginia.\n\nThat was surprising because densely populated Northern Virginia has the most lawmakers - and a reputation for being highly courted by lobbyists.\n\nFrom the results of my research, I also created a couple of bar graphs showing legislative gifts by region.\n\nExperts' opinions\n\nNext, I contacted Stephen Medvic, an assistant professor of political science at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, and Nelson Wikstrom, a political science professor at VCU. I told both experts about my findings and asked their opinions on why Eastern Virginia legislators received the most gifts.\n\nCalos, the government watchdog, told me that political donors use gifts and campaign contributions to gain access to politicians. \"Money does buy access,\" he said. \"Access is the gateway to influence.\"\n\n(Jeff South, an associate professor in the VCU School of Mass Communications, contributed to this article.)\n\nRobb Crocker can be reached by e-mail at cobb9crock@msn.com", "provenance": { "extracted_by": "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6", "extracted_at": "2026-07-05", "verified": true }, "similar": [ { "slug": "2002-march-april-students-reveal-gifts-to-legislators", "score": 0.497 }, { "slug": "1999-september-out-to-the-ball-game", "score": 0.401 }, { "slug": "2004-september-october-lobbyist-data-rich-with-trips-food-gifts", "score": 0.308 }, { "slug": "2001-julyaugust-money-and-politics", "score": 0.145 }, { "slug": "2003-julyaugust-learning-lessons-while-tracing-pols-spending", "score": 0.131 } ], "html_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2001-julyaugust-legislator-gifts.html", "json_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2001-julyaugust-legislator-gifts.json" }