type: timeline_event
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) operates a corporate-funded 'scholarship' program that provides state legislators with free trips to luxury resort conferences, creating a sophisticated mechanism for corporate access to lawmakers. Through this system, corporations like PhRMA, Eli Lilly, and Time Warner Cable contribute millions annually to fund legislators' flights, hotel rooms, and meals at vacation destinations like Scottsdale's Westin Kierland Resort and New Orleans. By 2010, corporations were collectively paying as much as $6 million annually to ALEC, with the scholarship fund alone spending approximately $600,000 per year to subsidize trips for hundreds of state legislators. The program operates through state-level ALEC chairs (both legislators and corporate lobbyists) who raise funds from corporations, which ALEC holds in segregated 'trust' accounts before disbursing as travel reimbursements—creating a structure that obscures the direct corporate-to-legislator gift relationship. Legislators earning an average of $46,000 annually could not otherwise afford these luxury resort conferences, where they meet behind closed doors with corporate representatives to draft model legislation. The conferences include entertainment like golf tournaments, open bars, and baseball games sponsored by individual corporations, with legislators required to report only ALEC gifts rather than specific corporate sponsorships. ALEC even spent $138,000 entertaining legislators' children at conferences, encouraging lawmakers to bring families through a 'Kids Congress' program. This creates personal relationships between corporate lobbyists and the legislators who will later vote on corporate-drafted bills, with one Ohio ALEC chair explicitly telling corporate donors that 'with information disseminated at meetings, my desire is that the Ohio Legislature will pass and repeal laws to make Ohio a much more business friendly state.' The scholarship program represents a legalized system for corporations to purchase face-time with state legislators while avoiding lobbying disclosure requirements and state gift laws.