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The campaign to boost Hochul’s plans to overhaul car insurance laws is already one of the most expensive lobbying efforts in state history. But the full extent might never be known.

As POLITICO Pro reported this morning, Uber has already topped $10 million in its advocacy efforts this year. That puts it within striking distance of the largest ever single-year lobbying campaign — and there are still eight months left in the year.
But Uber’s far from the only group talking about car insurance.

Protecting American Consumers Together, a group that advocates for an overhaul of the country’s regulations on personal injury lawsuits, has spent at least seven figures so far this year running TV ads bashing “greedy billboard lawyers” and “fat cat legislators in Albany” for making New Yorkers pay more for car insurance. “Down in Florida they took on billboard lawyers, and it’s paid off,” a narrator for one of the ads says while the screen displays a headline about auto insurance rates falling 8 percent in that state.

PACT has not registered with the Commission on Ethics and Lobbying in Government, which would require it to identify its spending and funders. And it’s probably not required to do so either, since the ads don’t contain key words like the names of specific bills or requests for people to call their legislators on the issue — two things that would categorize them as lobbying efforts.

“This seems like a classic example of an issue ad that is designed to sway the public about a policy issue, but is not technically lobbying,” said Reinvent Albany’s Rachael Fauss.

Asked if it was registered with New York, PACT said in a statement that “all of its advocacy is done in compliance with applicable laws.”