Campaign finance and double standards - cont'd
Before the City Council runoff election, the Chronicle's Kristen Mack wrote an important column on SEIU's possibly illegal efforts to influence the At Large position 2 race between Jay Aiyer and Sue Lovell.
Mack followed up on the story in her Friday column:
SEIU accompanied its endorsement of Lovell with a $10,000 check. But it went beyond that.
With eight mail pieces and phone banks on her behalf, the union spent an estimated $120,000 to benefit Lovell.
[snip]
Donations by unions and corporations to city candidates are limited by city ordinance to $10,000 per candidate in any election cycle. Aiyer filed an ethics complaint with the city of Houston alleging that SEIU effectively exceeded that limit in that the mailers were a "coordinated campaign expenditure" and were "made in cooperation, consultation or concert with" Lovell.
Larry Veselka, a former county Democratic chairman who spoke on Lovell's behalf at the hearing, said Aiyer has not shown that the SEIU's activities constituted being in concert with Lovell. "He has not presented evidence other than pure speculation," Veselka said. "The existence of an independent mailer is not sufficient alone."
[snip]
The ethics committee is charged with reviewing alleged acts of impropriety and misconduct on the part of city officials and candidates for city office. It didn't make a decision last week. Instead it took the complaint under advisement, with the plan to discuss it further and render a decision at the next meeting.
In the end, it doesn't matter. The race is decided. And the fact is, SEIU did the mail-out and Lovell knew it was coming — though she told the committee that she and the union deliberately avoided communication about the specifics.
As long as Lovell and SEIU maintain that there was no coordination, there is little way to prove there was. And city election rules place no limits on uncoordinated campaign expenditures.
SEIU has indicated it plans to be a major player in municipal politics, and certainly violated the spirit if not the letter of the city's laws on coordinated campaign expenditures by unions and corporations.
Interestingly, the Chronicle Editorial LiveJournalists and many other partisans who love to criticize Rep. Tom DeLay (R) on campaign finance continue their silence on the questionable assistance provided to Democrat Lovell's campaign by SEIU.
BLOGVERSATION: On the wrong side of big money (Houtopia).
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 12/18/05 07:35 PM | Print |
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