Tougher reporting requirements for political spending sought
Gilroy – Two councilmen who swept to victory in the November election with thousands of dollars in help from local firefighters say they would back tougher reporting requirements for political spending by special interest groups.
Voters who cast ballots in the last election did not learn until this month that the Gilroy Firefighters Political Action Committee spent $5,357 on mailers promoting the candidacies of Dion Bracco and Craig Gartman. In January, both candidates followed through on campaign pledges to oppose efforts to uproot binding arbitration, the fire union’s strongest bargaining chip in labor negotiations.
A loophole in state allows large expenditures by independent political action committees – those not controlled by any candidate – to go unreported until after the election if the spending takes place before the 16-day window leading up to an election. Any PAC that spends $1,000 or more inside that window must report the spending within 24 hours.
The PAC representing the 36-member fire union steered the majority of the money – $3,942 – on efforts to elect Bracco. The newly elected councilman said he does not “see anything wrong” with passing an ordinance that would require local PACs to report big expenditures before an election.
“Just keep everything above board so everybody knows where the money’s coming from,” Bracco said. “(The candidates) report three times before the election. I think it would be only right that anybody else that’s going to support a candidate should say what they’re spending.”
The firefighters PAC has spent more than $11,000 on the last two elections – a figure only outstripped by the candidates themselves. The large amount represents a relatively new phase in the union’s political involvement. For more than a decade, the union typically contributed a few hundred dollars to candidate campaign committees.
While the increased spending since 2003 pales in comparison to the amounts spent on county and state races, the firefighters PAC accounts for a significant share of expenditures for a Gilroy City Council race. Their latest expenditures, for instance, were nearly half the amount spent by the last-place finisher in the November race.
Yet voters did not learn of the expenditure until three months after the election.
The state’s Political Reform Act allows cities to impose more stringent reporting requirements on PACs when the majority of the committee’s spending takes place within a specific jurisdiction, according to the Fair Political Practices Commission.
Proposed state legislation that has received overwhelming support from both sides of the aisle would tighten the definition to include any “city general purpose committee,” such as the firefighters PAC, that makes 50 percent or more of its contributions within a given city.
An ordinance modeled on the state laws would have forced the union to report its spending before voters reached the ballot box.
Fire union leaders said they have no problem with stricter reporting requirements, and Mayor Al Pinheiro said he would back an ordinance that imposes pre-election deadlines for big political spending.
Gartman, the first-place finisher in the election and a beneficiary of the union’s largesse, said he too would support such an ordinance.
“As far as full disclosure, I don’t have a problem with that,” he said. “You want to be able to catch what’s going on before the election.”
