Tag: ethics review committee

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.

June 1st City Council meeting, (Part 1)

by The San Marxist, posted in Meetings

This may not be the most important item exactly, but Item 22 was definitely the strangest item of the night. And Mark Gleason was the strangest acting councilmember of the night.

Item 22 is about adding language about lobbyists to the code of Ethics. Lobbyists would have to register with the city, and issue reports every two months. Apparently this has been floating around since 2018. Last December, Council gave direction that a committee should be formed. The commission met for three months and gave tonight’s recommendation to council.

Immediately Gleason made a motion to postpone the measure until the end of August. Everyone was caught by surprise. Baker was obviously annoyed and sparred back and forth with Gleason.

Gleason said:

  • He was contacted by constituents over the weekend and now he needs more time to research this
  • He’s worried about unintended consequences
  • The people need to be here to comment on this, and it should be postponed until they are meeting in person.
  • He’s worried about the constitutionality of restricting free speech like this
  • We already passed a campaign finance law, so this is redundant.

The thing is that these five points are easily swatted down, and they were swatted down, and Gleason just stuck to these five points over and over again. It was a bizarre performance and made me wonder what exactly got planted in his ear over the weekend.

The swatting down of these points went roughly like this:

  • The lawyers and experts are right here! If you have questions, please ask them!
  • What unintended consequences might you be imagining? The recommended policies are in place in many similar cities. No new language was written for San Marcos.
  • This has been brewing for 3 years. Citizen have been forced to show up over zoom for the past 15 months – what exactly is making this so unusual that it needs to be postponed, especially since the new election season will be underway by then?
  • No one is restricting free speech. When money is involved, lobbyists just need to register and report.
  • Campaign finance laws are just a different thing. Quid pro quos and influence are not exclusive to campaign finance.

Anyway. I’m getting ahead of myself.

Gleason’s motion to postpone until the 2nd August meeting fails. Then he moves to postpone until the 1st August meeting. That also fails. (Baker, Derrick, Garza, and Hughson vote no.)

There are other concerns – who qualifies as a lobbyist and who is exempt? What should the penalty be? etc.

Hughson had quibbles that annoyed me:

  • Hughson feels like this just doesn’t happen in San Marcos and isn’t needed. This is very naive of her. She says that no one has approached her on council or as mayor. Fine, but perhaps other councilmembers signal a willingness to play ball that makes them more approachable than you?
  • She wanted to expand the definition of lobbyist to include any instance of influence, and then she was tying herself in knots because it would include citizens and nonprofits.

Shane Scott wonders what the big deal is. It still comes up for a vote. Why does it matter if someone picked up the phone and called you ahead of time? He wins the prize for the most disingenuous councilmember.

Gleason keeps these panicked nonsensical rants going. It feels like this: Someone called him over Memorial Day weekend and convinced him to postpone. That person fed Gleason these reasons, and Gleason can’t maintain a coherent conversation about them because they’re not his real reasons, and he’s unwilling to divulge the real reason. He was like a parody of someone squirming under pressure – practically yanking on his collar and wiping his brow and saying, “Is it me or is it hot in here?”

Gleason hasn’t been on council long, but his general shtick is to be the most earnest person on the block, although a bit repetitive and rambly. I don’t always agree with him, but he usually appears to be operating in good faith. This was like an easily rattled stooge sweating bullets before a mob boss. It was very strange!

Finally, conversation seems to be winding down. Surely they are getting ready to vote on this first reading!

But wait! Saul Gonzalez makes a motion to postpone. Everyone is dumbfounded. Saul’s reasons are that it’s getting late and he’s not thinking clearly anymore. He wants to postpone to the second meeting in August, ie the same as Gleason’s first attempt.

WHAT ON EARTH. The conversation has been had already. It’s now 10:30 pm. This is only the first reading – if you have misgivings, you still have a 2nd reading to bring them up! Nothing is binding here! (Like, did someone also get to Saul? Am I imagining conspiracies here?!)

The amendment to postpone fails. Again. As before, Baker, Derrick, Garza, and Hughson vote no.

They vote on some dates to implement the policy, and then hold the final vote on the first reading. It passes 5-2. Gleason and Scott vote no. Hughson and Gonzalez both qualify their yes-votes with ominous “for now…”s.

Well! Not the most important item necessarily, but definitely the most fun to write up.