By Adam Pagnucco.
Recently, I published a series on fundraising by county executive candidates through January 14. Today, we will start looking at candidates for county council.
First, let’s briefly describe the traditional and public financing systems used by candidates. The vast majority of council candidates are using public financing, which distributes public matching funds for contributions made by in-county residents. To be eligible to receive matching funds (a mandatory requirement to be competitive), council candidates must meet these thresholds of contributions from in-county residents:
Council at-large candidates: 250 contributions totaling at least $20,000
District candidates: 125 contributions totaling at least $10,000
The amount of matching funds available for a candidate is capped at $290,060 for at-large candidates and $145,030 for district candidates. Candidates may still collect contributions from individuals after hitting these caps but their pace of fundraising will slow. The effect of this is that strong publicly financed candidates who max out their matching funds will have similar campaign budgets to other strong publicly financed opponents.
Candidates in traditional financing don’t get matching funds, but may accept contributions from individuals, PACs and other entities of up to $6,000 each for the cycle. Council candidates in traditional financing include Drew Morrison (District 1), Allison Eriksen (District 3), Ricky Fai Mui (District 3), and Sharif Hidayat, Dawn Luedtke and Harold Maldonado (District 7). The data in this series does not include candidates who filed after the January report deadline.
Once again, I restate my description of the many problems with the information posted by the State Board of Elections (SBE). One of the worst issues is that the line for requested public matching funds appears inaccurate for many candidates and, in a couple cases, was significantly different from matching funds ultimately awarded. There have also been many amendments to reports. One report I saw was on amendment version five.
I attempted to correct these issues by contacting candidates and asking them for accurate data. Some responded. Others did not. This created intolerable apples and oranges issues with the data, particularly on the issue of matching funds.
I don’t blame the candidates. Instead, SBE is responsible for publishing reports on which the summary sheets match downloadable contributions and expenditures. In far too many cases, it does not.
Accordingly, my analysis of council fundraising will be more limited than my work on the county executive candidates. I will analyze contributions and expenditures available from candidates’ spreadsheets. However, I won’t be using estimates of public matching funds received and requested to analyze adjusted cash balances and burn rates. I may be more comfortable calculating such estimates when the next full batch of reports is due in April.
With the above said, there is a lot to learn about the early starts of these candidates. We will get into the numbers next.