Council
Rejects "Fair Fight Fund" |
By Anita Varghese
Staff Writer
October 25 -- Advocates for public financing of political
campaigns went home disappointed on Tuesday after the City Council
rejected their pleas to direct staff to study changes in Santa Monica’s
election law.
Council member Kevin McKeown’s motion would have directed the offices
of the City Clerk and the City Attorney to gather information on what is commonly
known as a “fair fight fund.”
Council candidates who agree to campaign spending limits would be allowed to
tap into a public financed fund if those candidates are the subject of unusual
negative campaigns paid for by non-participating candidates or independent political
committees.
The motion went nowhere because only McKeown and Council member Ken Genser
voted for the staff direction.
“Over the last few election cycles, more and more outside money is coming
into races,” McKeown said. “More and more of it is being spent on
negative campaigns instead of positive campaigns, and this makes elections a
negative experience that people may want to avoid and our democracy is not well
served.
“As a council, we are problem solvers and detail oriented,” he
said. “I don’t want us to get so tangled up in the details that
we never get progress off the ground.”
The majority of the council focused on several unanswered questions about the
fair fight fund, which they said was not fully described in the staff report.
In July, staff was directed by the council to return with information on a
variety of issues related to public financing of political campaigns, not just
one issue such as a fair fight fund.
McKeown said the purpose of his motion was to direct staff to return with information
that would answer those questions, such as establishing a workable definition
of an attack campaign, establishing parameters in which candidates could tap
into the fair fight fund and dollar limits.
Mayor Richard Bloom and Council members Pam O’Connor and Bobby Shriver
voted against the motion.
They said too many prior restraint and free speech issues exist with public
financing of political campaigns, issues that are protected by the U.S. Constitution
and U.S. Supreme Court precedent.
In November 2006, McKeown and O’Connor were the subjects of smear campaigns,
with McKeown being the target of $400,000 worth of negative television advertisements,
an unprecedented amount for a local campaign.
“There is not demonstrable corruption in the election process other than
the independent expenditures that we need to counter,” said Brandon Marlowe,
a member of Vote4SM, a nonprofit organization that describes itself as a coalition
of Santa Monica citizens in support of electoral reform.
“We don’t need to navigate the minefield of laws that make it so
difficult to implement public financing for City Council elections. What we
do need is to establish a legacy for Santa Monica that says money can’t
buy elections.”
O’Connor said a fair fight fund is not necessary when residents let their
strong aversion to negative campaigns be known by consistently voting for candidates
who run positive campaigns.
She said she was easily re-elected even though she had a small group of volunteers
in her campaign and, despite the hit pieces, McKeown received the
most votes among all the Council candidates in last year’s
election.
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