Two years ago, Speaker Curt Bromm said publicly that it was wrong for lawmakers to leave office and immediately become lobbyists.

On Friday, just two days after leaving office, Bromm registered as a lobbyist with the Clerk of the Legislature.

"I decided that probably whatever knowledge or experience I have is best used a soon as it can be," Bromm said Friday. "It seemed to be the right thing to do."

That's in stark contrast to 2003, when he co-sponsored an unsuccessful bill to preclude lawmakers from lobbying the Legislature for one year after leaving office.

At the time, Bromm told The Associated Press: "There needs to be some kind of break between service in a body like this and coming back in and trying to influence the legislation that is passed," Bromm said. "It just leaves a little bit of a bad taste in the mouths of some of the members of the public."

Bromm said Friday he was not being hypocritical, stressing that he twice tried to get such a law passed.

"I thought about that a lot," Bromm said. "But the body has not felt that was an appropriate restriction."

Jack Gould, the Nebraska point man for the nonpartisan political watchdog group Common Cause, has tried for years to get a bill passed requiring state senators and other elected officials to wait at least a year before becoming lobbyists.

At least 20 other states and the federal government have such laws.

"It isn't fair that people profit from public service," Gould said. "If you turn it around and start using it for personal gain it kind of cheapens the position.

"The public entrusts you to do your work and then you use that trust in some cases to even work against the public if you are hired by an interests that isn't necessarily working for the public good," he said.

Bromm used to chair the Legislature's Transportation and Telecommunications Committee. Among his new clients are the Nebraska Cable Communications Association and the Nebraska Telecommunications Association.

That made Gould bristle.

"If you are chair of the committee and are serving on the committee and suddenly become a lobbyist for an interest group, you know all the ins and outs of that committee," he said. "That gives you a tremendous advantage over everyone else, and that isn't necessarily in the interest of the public good either."

Gould said he was trying to find a senator to sponsor a lobbying bill this session.

Bromm certainly isn't the first Nebraska lawmaker to go from senator to lobbyists seemingly overnight.

Gould said many voters in the Papillion area were irked when their senator, Ron Withem, resigned as speaker of the Legislature in 1997 to become the University of Nebraska's main lobbyist.

Withem left a $12,000-per-year senator's seat for a salary of $82,000.

Speaker Dennis Baack of Kimball resigned from the Legislature in 1993 to lobby for the Nebraska Community College Association.

Sen. Ernie Chambers of Omaha, who co-sponsored the 2003 lobbying bill with Bromm, said "questions might be raised if a person had indicated that it's inappropriate to leave the Legislature and become a lobbyist."

Bromm, who did not seek re-election in November and mounted an unsuccessful bid for Congress, said he will play by the rules.

"I will follow the law and do what the law says," he said. "I'll do whatever I do ethically."

Nebraska Legislature 

Common Cause