Tag: campaign finance

Hours 2:50-3:40, 12/14/22

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Item 20: Campaign Funding, redux.

So you want to raise money for your city council campaign! Right now there are a few caps:

  1.  Individuals cannot contribute more than $500.
  2. If you contribute more than $300, then your councilmember has to recuse themself when anything that you’re connected to comes up.
  3. There’s an overall limit, based on the number of registered voters.  Councilmember’s cap is 50¢ per registered voter, and mayor’s cap is 75¢ per registered voter.

Jude Prather and Shane Scott brought this issue up.

Jude Prather goes first.  “It’s not the cap that’s the issue. It’s just confusing and too complicated. Things keep getting more expensive, and we’re going to have to revisit this year after year.  Make it simpler. What if you get a lot of contributions?  There should just be a max of $300 per person.”

Jane: We currently have a limit of $500 per person.

Jude: This is just so complicated. I mean, cost per voter? 

Jane explains, “It’s just supposed to grow as San Marcos grows. If they just had a hard cap, the amount wouldn’t grow as San Marcos grows. We could change the scaling factor, though.”

(They keep saying “Teepo signs” when they talk about campaign costs. I have no idea what a Teepo sign is.)

Jude keeps going. He’s on quite a tear. What about ballot initiatives? And PACs? This doesn’t apply to them! What if a ballot initiative affects a race? (He was worried about this with marijuana decriminalization, if you’ll recall. What if we turn out young, liberal voters??)

Jane: I’m having trouble following what your solution is. 

Jude Prather: I want it simpler. Just $300 cap per person. Get rid of the complicated charts with different numbers and amounts.

(OH!! T-Post signs! Got it.)

Jane Hughson was my favorite councilmember of the evening. She cannot get over the accusation that the funding cap is “too complicated”.  She keeps saying things like, “I’m really trying to understand what you mean.  You take the number of voters, and multiply by 50¢.  What is the complicated part?” and “I can understand if you want to change 50¢ to $1 or $1.25.  But what is the complicated part?” 

Eventually Shane and Jude have enough dignity to stop asserting that it’s too complicated, when it’s plainly not.  (And they’re not shameless enough to just bluntly say they want unlimited campaign spending.)

Everyone weighs in on what they’d like the scaling factor to be:

Shane Scott and Alyssa Garza: $1.25 per voter, for both mayor and councilmembers
Matthew Mendoza and Mark Gleason: $1 per voter, for both mayor and councilmembers
Saul Gonzales and Jane Hughson don’t seem to care.

Everyone seems to settle on the simplicity of $1 per registered voter.  There! We did actually make it simpler!

One final note: last time, there was also griping that the number of registered voters fluctuates with different election cycle. No one really pursued that this time, which is good, because it is a pretty lame complaint.

…

I was surprised that Alyssa Garza is opposed to spending caps.  Her argument goes that more money means hiring more local neighbors who might otherwise be disengaged, and increase local involvement.  

I can see her point, but I don’t think that outweighs the built-in advantage for candidates with wealthy friends. I put a higher weight on making sure anyone can run a competitive campaign, regardless of economic background. (On the other hand, Alyssa has run for city council and I haven’t. So she has relevant knowledge.)

As a side note, apparently in Texas it is illegal to cap self-donations to one’s own campaign.  So wealthy candidates will always have an advantage.

Item 13:

The Ethics Review Committee seems to always be a thorn in the side of Shane Scott, and to a lesser degree Jude Prather and Mark Gleason.  I don’t know if they’ve been busted for something, or if they just don’t like the idea that they’re being watched.

Right now, councilmembers have to turn in two sets of documentation:

  1. Yearly financial disclosure
  2. Campaign contributions disclosure

The ERC looks over these, and flags anything that looks fishy.  They’ve been doing this for years, but it’s not formally city policy. Jane Hughson wanted to formally codify the practice.

Shane Scott moves to deny. “The ERC does not need to meddle,” he says, “There are state rules, and the state will get involved.”

Jane explains where it came from, “After we passed the $500 cap, there was a candidate who took $1000, not knowing about the cap, and people were asking, “What do we do? Where do we report this?” It didn’t violate state rules, so you can’t report it to the Texas Ethics Commission.”

Shane Scott: “We shouldn’t be more restrictive than the state.”

Jane: “Okay, but we are. We just discussed the campaign caps. So…?”

Shane Scott removes his motion to deny, and Mark Gleason makes a motion to approve.

Next, Shane Scott makes an amendment to remove all the parts where the ERC looks at financial disclosure statements. “The state will take care of it!” he says again.

Jane again asks, “How would the state take care of it?”

Shane says, “FOIA requests, etc.”

The lawyer, Michael Consantino, says nope.  The state would not get involved.

No one seconds Shane Scott’s amendment, and so it dies. 

The overall vote to let the ERC review financial disclosures and campaign contributions:

There you have it.

…

Item 21: Jane Hughson wants a new zoning.  There are a lot of applications for Heavy Commercial or Light Industrial where council has to write up a bunch of good-neighbor exceptions because there are residents living nearby. Usually they want to rule out uses based on loudness/smell/vibrations/etc. The method is to make a “restricted covenant agreement,” which sounds religious, but isn’t.

Jane is proposing something that she calls “Business Park”. Maybe not storefronts, but businesses that you wouldn’t mind living next door to.  Smaller in scale and height, regulations on where loading docks could be, cranking down on noise/smell/vibrations/etc. 

Everyone likes this idea. It’ll come back in some form.

Hours 1:18 to 3:50, 10/3/22

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Item 20: Here are some current city ordinances:

1. City Council and P&Z members all fill out financial disclosure forms every year.

2. City Council has some caps on campaign finance:

– There is a cap on total fundraising: you can’t raise more than 50¢ per registered voter in an election cycle. (Mayor gets 75¢ per registered voter.)

– No donor can donate more than $500 to a candidate in an election cycle. Any donations over $300 trigger certain mandatory recusals for conflict of interest.

These were passed circa 2018. Since then, the Ethics Review Committee has looked these forms over and followed up with the person for clarifications/omissions/sloppiness.   However, that review is not part of their official duties.

Jane Hughson brings this up to formally add it to their duties. After all, we have these laws, someone had better be double-checking the forms, and so it might as well be the ERC.

Shane Scott dislikes the formula for the donation limit. It’s based on the number of registered voters, and Shane argues that voter registrations fluctuate substantially from year to year. 

This is true! If medical marijuana is on the ballot, you can register a whole bunch of college students, who then graduate in a few years.  Odd years have low turn out, presidential years have especially high turnout. Etc. (Now, it’s fair in the sense that all the candidates running for the same council seat have the same cap. But sure, between different council seats that come up for election in different years, the total will fluctuate.)

Anyway, good news! There is an easy fix: just take the average of the voter registration numbers over the past four years. Then every cycle always includes one presidential cycle and one off-presidential cycle contributing to their voter registration number.

Jude Prather says that the fundraising cap isn’t keeping up with the price to run a campaign.  In a way, this is true, but in a more important way, this is silly.   The point is to constrain the price tags of campaigns.

Suppose it works out that candidates are capped at $10K total contributions. And suppose further that it would be easy to spend $30K on signs and Facebook ads and whatever else.  In that sense, Jude is correct – the cap is not keeping up with the potential cost of the campaign.

But one big reason to impose a cap is to level the playing field.  You want candidates with poor friends to be able to wage a successful campaign against candidates with wealthy friends.  If everyone is capped at $10K, then great – spend it wisely.  Sure, you could spend more, but this is fair.  However, if the cap is $30K, and Matthew Mendoza can only raise $2k, then the cap serves absolutely no purpose. It hasn’t leveled the playing field at all.

Bottom line: if the cap doesn’t constrain the spending of the candidates with wealthy connections, then it doesn’t help the candidates without wealthy connections.

(But here’s the counterargument: name recognition is really expensive, and encumbents have a huge advantage. Capping the fundraising means it’s harder for an outsider to challenge an encumbent.)

Saul Gonzales asks, “how do voters get taken off the voter rolls?”

Jane Hughson gives him a detailed answer: in January of odd-numbered years, they send out a mailer to all voters.  If it bounces back as return-to-sender, they assume that the person no longer lives at that address, then the voter gets put in a limbo for a while.  In this waiting period, if the person tries to vote locally, they can hash it out. After a certain length of time, the person is removed from the voter roll. At any point, if they register and vote somewhere else, they’d be removed locally.*

Mark Gleason raises some other concerns with the cost of elections – what about voters that move out of town and mistakenly get city ballots? What about city residents who vote in Wimberly, so city candidates have to advertise at those polling locations?  I dunno, Mark.  What about them.  He also grumbles about election cycles being 3 years instead of yearly. 

In the end, this gets postponed till the end of November.  Basically, campaign finance laws are important, but there’s a fox-guarding-the-hen-house thing when Council tries to write its own laws.

The point of tonight’s discussion was that the Ethics Review Committee should keep an eye on these things, but that largely wasn’t discussed.

…

Item 24: Max Baker proposes a committee to talk about noise ordinances and alcohol permits.  

I guess it’s not surprising, but Council apparently gets a ton of noise complaints – people in neighborhoods mad about the downtown bars. (I always wonder how fussy people are being – are we talking about hearing music from downtown outside your house, or inside your house? Probably many complaints are completely valid, and others would make me roll my eyes.)

Either way, Max’s suggestion is that venues with repeat offenses could be required to have a sound board person when music is being played, to keep the volume in check.  

I know from watching P&Z meetings that determining decibels is a big problem for code enforcement and cops, but I’ve never understood why there isn’t a technological solution.  Surely there’s a little device that measures decibels and records the data to an app.  If an officer is called in for a noise complaint, then the business should have to produce decibel data for the evening, on the spot.  

On alcohol sales:  Max wants the committee to look at some things that lead to underage binge drinking downtown.  He gives the example of “bottle service”. I know people can buy a bottle of wine or champagne for their table, which they then can pour out as they please, but apparently you can also buy a 5th of vodka and then pour your own drinks.  (I was not aware of this, but it seems to be pretty much as Max describes.)

Mark Gleason thinks that venues have tightened up over the past ten years, which amuses me. As you’ve settled down, joined city council, and had a baby, it’s the venues that have tightened up?

Anyway, Alyssa Garza, Jude Prather, and Max Baker will be on the committee, plus a couple folks from P&Z.

…

Item 25: There’s a discussion about the eviction delay.  When Covid hit, San Marcos implemented a 3-month eviction delay. We’ve discussed this here before.

Today’s agenda is just for a discussion, but it ends up being a rather thoughtful discussion, and I’m not being sarcastic. Council did well.

Alyssa Garza starts off by noting how poorly the implementation has gone: landlords have strong armed tenants into moving out without going through the actual legal process.  Having an eviction on your record prevents you from being able to find anywhere to rent, and so tenants will do anything to avoid this.  Therefore many tenants aren’t being given the full 90 days to recoup their back rents. 

Shane Scott asks about people abusing the system: are they just using their three free months, skipping out on the rent, and then getting three free months at the next apartment, over and over again? (Oh, Shane. Please.)

The answer: no, they’re not. Getting evicted seriously wrecks your ability to get another place to live.

Mark Gleason argues that landlords are missing out on 7-8 months rent by the time an entire eviction plays itself out, and that dragging out the inevitable is bad for both tenant and landlord.   (I don’t know if that 7-8 months bit is accurate or not. I’m sure it occasionally is, but other landlords definitely kick out tenants on much shorter notice.)

It is true that landlords can get screwed over by tenants. But ultimately, landlords have far more power over tenants than tenants have over landlords. It’s an asymmetric power imbalance, and tenants are way more vulnerable than landlords. Therefore our job is to shore up protections for tenants.

Several people make the point that the Covid emergency is over, and it’s time to segue into a permanent solution.  I think this is correct: it’s time to look at permanent protections for tenants from abuses of power by landlords. (Evictions are part of this, but so are unsafe living conditions, loss of privacy, illegal rate hikes, and so on.)

Primarily, we need a well-funded tenants’ council, with affordable or free lawyer access.  In my fantasy, I would pay for that with a tax on rental properties. (Will that cost get passed onto tenants? Of course, but I can’t think of any other way to fund this.)

One last part of this: underlying this discussion is a lack of close, affordable housing.  If it were easy to find an acceptable place to move, then the power dynamics of landlords and tenants would be hugely transformed.

As I always say, we need some things:

  1. An ongoing, updated inventory of apartment complexes, broken out by rental cost.
  2. An ongoing estimate of the population of San Marcos, broken out by income level.
  3. An estimate of how many units are approved to be built over the next few years.

We’ve got to know how much housing we need, and then we need a plan to build it.

But also, go forth and fight for a tenants’ council, with a lawyer! We need that too.

* I just deleted a line – I thought Saul responded rudely to Jane. But I went back and listened again just now, and I misheard him. Sorry for the misunderstanding!