Gilroy City Council candidate Fred Tovar has a history of missing election law deadlines and was fined nearly $2,000 for doing so, according to county records.
Tovar said Tuesday that after 10 years he has no recollection of the details surrounding the March 2006 fine or how it was resolved.
He voiced certainty, however, that the violations were an oversight in his successful run for the San Jose Evergreen Community College Board of Trustees in 2002, and that he paid the $1,930 fine.
“I feel that it was taken care of, yes, so it’s a non-issue now,” he said Tuesday, a day after seeing the county’s only remaining record of the matter, a log entry.
Had it not been paid, Tovar said, he would not have been allowed to seek office again. He subsequently was elected to the Gilroy school board in 2008 and 2012 and is now board president.
But a spokesman for the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters, which levied the fine, said Tuesday that nothing in the law would preclude a candidate from running for office over an unpaid fine related to violations of state election law—in this case the mandatory filings of campaign finance statements showing who donates and how money is spent.
Registrar spokesman Philip Chantri said late filings are the most common violation and that the county fined Tovar because it involved a local, not statewide election.
Had it been a state office the fine would have been levied by the state Fair Political Practices Commission.
It is the FPPC that requires regular finance reports to be filed with the county during a campaign.
Ironically, it is the county’s adherence to FPPC records retention rules that has left unanswered questions in the Tovar case.
Those rules require the registrar to keep election records for only two years and Tovar’s were destroyed, Chantri said.
“All we have left is [a] log that shows the [reporting] periods missed and the fine letter and date sent,” Chantri said.
And while five to 10 candidates in each election cycle are fined for similar violations, “it’s rare when you have hundreds of candidates on the ballot,” he said.
Tovar said that when he contacted the registrar’s office after being asked Monday about the matter by the Dispatch, “I was told that, obviously, if [the fine] was not paid I would not have been able run for three other offices, so obviously it was taken care of, I work hard to make sure these things don’t happen.”
Tovar is Director of Student Affairs and Assistant Director of Admissions for the Stanford School of Medicine’s physicians assistant school. He has the backing of his Gilroy school board colleagues for his City Council run.
The county log appears to indicate that between January 2005 and February 2009, Tovar missed filing campaign reports for seven filing periods and violations continued after he was sent notice of the fine by certified letter on March 12, 2006. Less than two weeks earlier, he had complied with some filings, albeit late.
The Friends of Fred Tovar campaign committee also is listed in the log as having missed one six-month filing period in 2005, for which warning letters were sent in September and October of that year. That report was filed in March 2006, according to the log. The committee was not fined.
In Tovar’s case, a column in the log for the date the fine was paid and another indicating if the matter went to the county’s Department of Revenue for collection both are blank.
“The [Registrar of Voters] staff member responsible [for the Tovar matter] has retired, so we can’t say for certain it was not paid; we can only say there is nothing in that column, Chantri said.
