Gilroy firefighter’s union has spent the most money
– other than the candidates – in the last two City Council
elections
Gilroy – In the last two city council elections, the Gilroy Fire Fighters Political Action Committee spent more than $11,000 to sway public opinion – a figure only outstripped by the candidates themselves. But in the case of the firefighters PAC, voters had no clue about the spending until after they cast their ballots.
A “loophole” in state law allows independent political action committees – those not controlled by any candidate – to delay reporting big expenditures until well after an election.
Mayor Al Pinheiro supports the idea of adopting stricter reporting requirements for local PACs.
“I’d be in favor of allowing people to know more up front as to who’s supporting who,” said Pinheiro, who benefited from the firefighters’ largesse during his 2003 mayoral bid. “As candidates we have to declare what we’re spending. Why wouldn’t you include everybody else? I thought the whole idea is you want transparency to show who’s spending what.”
Art Amaro, president of the 36-member fire union that finances the PAC, said they are open to change.
“I’m not dead set against it either way,” he said. “If they want to do it before, then everything’s up front and that’s fine. But if they want to do it the other way, that’s fine with me too. It’s not really that big of an issue. We eventually find out who spends what on who.”
Mailers depicting firefighters and various candidates were the only indication of the PAC’s spending in the run-up to the last two elections.
But campaign finance forms filed at City Hall after the elections indicate the PAC may have failed to properly report thousands of dollars spent on the Nov. 4, 2003 race. Amaro said a consultant filed the paperwork in that election and he plans to contact the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission to look into the matter.
Two years ago, the firefighters PAC spent $6,061 on mailers to support four candidates. Last November, they spent another $5,357 on mailers supporting two candidates who pledged to protect binding arbitration, the union’s strongest bargaining chip in labor negotiations.
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 race.
Yet voters did not learn of the expenditure until three months after the election.
The law that allows post-election reporting of such large expenditures was grafted onto the Political Reform Act in 1985, according to Bob Stern, president of the Center for Governmental Studies, in Los Angeles.
“In the past you had groups that had to file in 50 or 60 jurisdictions,” he said. “If a state committee was involved in local races, they had to file in every city and they had to follow each jurisdiction’s deadlines. The purpose (of the change) was to cut down on a lot of paperwork, but unfortunately it created this loophole.”
Stern, who helped write the election laws in 1974 and served as a watchdog at the FPPC in the decade after, advocated disclosure of all large political expenditures prior to an election.
“That’s what it should be in an ideal world,” he said. “I think it’s an issue that should be corrected.”
