Photo by billkoplitz.

As Councilmembers Tommy Wells (D-Ward 6) and Mary Cheh (D-Ward 3) introduce legislation requiring transition and inaugural committees to report contributions today, there’s a certain sense of déjà vu. After all, it was only four years ago that the council similarly moved to enforce campaign finance reporting requirements on exploratory committees, and even today, uncertainty remains as to whether that measure has been effective.

In 2005, four potential mayoral candidates — Vincent Orange, Michael A. Brown, A. Scott Bolden and Adrian Fenty — established exploratory committees to test the waters for possible runs at the city’s highest office. At that point, contributions to exploratory committees were unlimited and anonymous, leaving each of the four to raise as much money as they wanted without any accountability to the public as to who was giving the money. Orange, currently an At-Large Councilmember, raised close to $250,000 from donors he refused to name; only Fenty voluntarily disclosed donors and donations.

In response to complaints raised in relation to the committees, the Council passed the “Exploratory Committee Regulation Amendment Act” in 2007. The law not only explicitly mandated that exploratory committees file informational reports listing contributors and how much they gave, but also imposed limits on how much the committees could take in and how much individuals could contribute. According to the law, which went into effect in early 2008, a mayoral exploratory committee would be limited to $200,000, and donors to such a committee could only give $2,000 a pop. (The amounts went down from there: $150,000 and $1,500 from Council Chair, $100,000 and $1,000 for At-Large councilmembers, and so forth.) Additionally, contributions to exploratory committees would be counted as campaign contributions for the purposes of individual limits, so that one person who gave $2,000 to one mayoral exploratory committee would not then be able to give another $2,000 to the formal campaign.

Seems pretty clear, right? Well, no.

According to the D.C. Office of Campaign Finance’s official guide on campaign finance, exploratory committees “are not required to register and file reports while their activities are limited to determining the feasibility of an individual’s candidacy for office.”

So on the one hand, a D.C. law says that exploratory committees have to report contributions and contributors and stick to campaign finance limits. On the other, the agency in charge of monitoring and enforcing that very law seems to say just the opposite in the very campaign finance guide it makes available to all candidates on its website.

When we called OCF, spokesman Wesley Williams admitted that the campaign finance guide “is a little outdated and needs to be updated.” Williams also pointed out that the specifics of the 2007 law were outlined in a news release posted on OCF’s website just last week, likely in preparation for the 2012 campaign season.

Complaints about the opaque exploratory committees largely mirror those related to transition and inaugural committees today — they serve as convenient conduits for big money interests to funnel cash to candidates and campaigns without the usual disclosure associated with campaign committees. The council eventually got around to acting on exploratory committees, as Wells and Cheh want to do with transition and inaugural committees. But even if they get the law changed, its spirit will only be as effectively implemented as the city agency actually implementing it. Sure, maybe the folks at OCF just up and forgot to change the campaign finance guide to reflect the new law — but that sort of slip-up doesn’t only mislead potential candidates for elected office, but gives them a chance to raise the money without declaring it and simply claim, “hey, I was just doing what OCF told me to do.”

Though a small example, this seems to speak to the larger problem than the city faces in addressing ethics rules and regulations that need to be updated and strengthened. It’s easiest to respond to problems as they emerge, but piecemeal proposals often only create a patchwork of solutions that don’t fully address the problem or become impossibly cumbersome to navigate. Additionally, if the agency charged with enforcing these laws doesn’t have the capacity or resources to actually enforce them, well, then we’re bound to see trouble again.