Lobbyist Mike Ross defeated two bills in Indiana recently. There were two bills that had to do with adult entertainment. One, according to Ross, outlawed nude entertainment and required adult entertainment facilities to get a license. Clubs would have to close down and wait a year before they could open back up. Another outlawed the importaion of adult products into the state. If, for instance you wanted to buy a vibrator over the Internet, the vibrator couldn't be sent into Indiana.
Ross: "I put together a campaign to kill the bills. I didn't cost us very much. There was a big war between me and some other lobbyists back there who wanted my clients, were jacking them up. I saved my clients money. I got the bill killed. Everybody was amazed how easy it was. The joke that I was doing it over the Internet. I made two trips to Indiana, and I was able to line up all the votes. Everything went fantastically.
"One of the bills came up with an adult licensing permit for clubs that had live nude entertainment. In Indiana you can only have topless. The second bill had to do with the importation of adult product into the state. Once I found out about this I was called up by one of my clients telling me that they had a problem out there, they're closing down our clubs. I said what's the deal. They said here's the bill number. Have some fun. I asked if my expenses were covered. They told me no problem, bill the club. Within 15 minutes I called the legislator's office, had a copy of the bill and an appointment with the legislator that nobody else had. I made arrangements to go out there.
"I meet with the legislator. The meeting was scheduled for 15 minutes.Two hours later I got done with the staff and the consultants. We had already worked out another bill. Two lobbyists got wind of this, and what happened was, after I left, they turned around and went to the legislator saying don't listen to this guy he doesn't know what he's doing. He's from California. He wants these clients. It was like 85 clubs, or something like that, so they turned around and presented the clubs a bill for $60,000. The clubs called me up and said these guys killed your amendment, they're jacking you around, they're making you look bad, tell us what to do. At that point I said I had to think about it for 24 hours. It's not something where you come up with an answer right away. So I sat down and went about my business doing my thing.
"I went out that night to have a couple of drinks with some friends from the capital. It turns out that one of my friends happened to know somebody from Indiana. Who? We started talking. One thing led to another. The person from Indiana happens to be a lobbyist, and the guy from Indiana happened to have been married to the person who was one the chairpeople on the commitee, a leading Democrat on the committee, where the bill was being heard the next couple of days. So we aced out the lobbyists. I hired this guy for $7500 bucks. My overall expenses were like $2500. For $10,000 we put on an affective lobbying campaign. The bill was expected to leave the house of origin. But what happened was they killed it in the house of origin. What that means is real interesting. Normally a bill that's introduced in the house of origin is usually given courtesy votes and passes over to the other side to make the other house kill it.
"We were able to bottle this one us, and it flew through the first committee. Because we hadn't know, we hadn't get out there yet. When the second committee came up, the fiscal committee, that's when we turned around and jumped on it. We used the same approach for both bills. We killed both bills before they got moving anywhere. And everybody in Indiana was really amazed. The funny thing is, that when I did my [club] owners' meeting and I made this statement at the end of February, and I said something to the effect that we had some really good successes in Indiana, some people said this didn't happen.
"They [the Indiana clubs] don't have full nude. What it said was if you had live entertainment, and you showed breasts, what you had to do was you had to close your business down, re-go through the zoning process again and get an adult permit as well as a regular business permit. It was directed at cabaret-style clubs and what we were pushing for was an amendment that said this bill does not apply to us because we're already regulated by the ABC. So, anybody who was already regulated by the ABC is fine. What the bill was trying to do was go after swing clubs because they were a brand new thing that was coming up in Indiana. It's a whole phenomenon that's going around the country. What we tried to do was negotiate a way out of it. The lobbyists got in the middle of it and said don't negotiate it. I said fuck it, I'm just going to kill the bill. We put on a full-court press and killed the bill.
"There's a thing between lobbyists. In my state nobody's going to go after my clients. And I'm not going to go after somebody else's clients. It's a courtesy. I have to see these guys everyday, and I don't want to screw them. In Indiana these guys apparently were trying to feather their nest. They needed an extra client or another client.
"What they did was scare all the guys to death and said here's a bill for $60,000, if you want us to lobby and kill your bill and keep you guys in business, every club should pony up and thousand bucks and hire us. When I told them [the clubs] don't give them a nickel, it split everybody. What I had to do was put them back together again, and the way I did it - It was just such a fluke the way the thing happened and I'll admit it was a fluke. The principle is this. For a lobbyist you keep your ear to the ground you come up with a solution. That's what I'm paid for. I was not paid a salary to go and do that. In fact, that's one of the things most people don't understand.
When I went to Indiana, I wasn't doing it to make money. I was doing it for several reasons. 1) I'm registered in another state as a lobbyist. I can put that on my resume. 2) I have another group that I work with, and I'm starting to work with other groups around the country. Just like this, using them as a model. 3) I turned around and organized Indiana and came back to California saying, 'Okay, everybody, if Indiana can do it and they're backwoods guys, how about if you guys do it. Then all the clubs turned around, scratched their heads and said holy shit we better start doing this.
"What's happened is, I've started getting calls from people all over the country who want me to do what I did in Indiana. I've used Indiana as a model. From a statewide perspective, Indiana itself is just a good model-type state. It's kind of like a test market like Sacramento. It was a good area to start with. You could screw up and it wouldn't affect the rest of the world. I learned a lot. I did a lot. I think everybody came out happy. I spoke yesterday with one of the clubs that hired me. I asked them were they happy. They said, 'Hey, your saved our business, how could we not be happy."
