Micah Posner is signing on to voluntary expenditure limits for his run for city council. Photo by Chip Scheuer.
Micah Posner, who announced his run for Santa Cruz City Council last month, is planning his campaign around a few things: his familiarity with transportation and land use issues, his work as an activist and his decision to limit the amount of money he spends on his campaign this year—and by extension the amount of contributions he accepts.
Posner plans to keep his total expenditures at about $25,000, as outlined in this year’s voluntary expenditure limit guidelines.
The move puts him at odds with a trend that appears to be on the rise. Four city council candidates in the 2010 election—including the three who won—decided to forgo those voluntary limits. That’s the same number of candidates who chose not to adhere to the voluntary limits in the three previous elections combined. Posner thinks the community should say it’s had enough.
“We want to have the people who are most qualified and representing our issues on city council,” says Posner, who will be stepping down as director of People Power this summer for the race. “We don’t just want to elect the best fundraiser.”
There are voluntary limits both for how much money candidates can spend and what size contributions they can take from any one donor. The city adjusts both with every election to reflect cost of living increases. In the most recent cycle, the total expenditure limit was $24,270.
Public records indicate that in 2010, candidates spent much more than that.
Councilmember Hilary Bryant spent more than $43,000 on her first election. Fellow council newcomer David Terrazas spent more than $35,000 and incumbent Lynn Robinson more than $25,000. (All of the candidates did follow voluntary limits for single campaign contributions, which in 2010 were set at $310 for individuals and $745 for groups.)
Bryant says she went over the expenditure limit in part because she was unaware before running how much it would cost to run a campaign. “It was very important that I have adequate resources to introduce myself to the public,” she says in an email. “As it turns out, campaign costs are very high for all levels of office these days.”
Posner’s notion has its critics. Former Santa Cruz Sentineleditor Tom Honig says limiting the amount of money people can raise gives an advantage to people who can self-finance their campaigns—which isn’t regulated—and to incumbents, who already have name recognition and connections in the community.
“By drastically limiting it, it sounds like you’re leveling the playing field,” Honig says, “but you’re actually un-leveling it to the advantage of incumbents.”
Councilmember Ryan Coonerty agrees a setup with limits favors incumbents. That’s the reason Coonerty, who ran against four incumbents for his first election in 2004, says he decided not to accept the voluntary expenditure limits that year.
“Everyone who’s run before has name recognition across the city,” Coonerty says. “They can be in the newspaper on a weekly basis announcing their policies. And they’ve already paid for their lawn signs and everything else. If you’re a newcomer, you don’t have the name recognition. It’s much more difficult. You have to buy all your materials for the first time.”
Coonerty, who supports making the voluntary limit on individual contribution sizes mandatory, also decided to forgo limits for his second election in 2008 because he says it allowed him to reach more people. Coonerty spent more than $35,000 in 2004 and more than $40,000 in 2008. He says the money in 2008 allowed him to reach more voters and do an extra mailer.
Posner, a seasoned fundraiser who brings in $50,000 a year to People Power, isn’t the only candidate planning to make an issue out of money in local elections. Activist Steve Pleich, who announced this week he will run for office, will accept the voluntary contribution and expenditure limits and campaign on the issue. Incumbents Don Lane and Katherine Beiers, who both will probably run, say they would accept the limits also.
Candidate Richelle Noroyan, chair of the Santa Cruz County Democratic Central Committee, says she will definitely accept the contribution limits but probably forgo the expenditure limit. “That’s what I’m looking at doing,” Noroyan says. “I’m not set in stone yet.”
Money on My Mind
The discussion over expenditure limits has sparked a larger one about public campaign finance, something Posner also supports. The idea to set aside public funds that candidates would be able to use for their campaigns has at least one other high-profile supporter in County Treasurer Fred Keeley.
“I’m not looking for the perfect solution because there probably isn’t one,” says Keeley, who hosted a discussion about campaign finance at his house with Posner, Coonerty, Honig and others this year. “But I’m not interested in a system where [large] amounts of money come in and create great distortions in terms of candidates’ ability to get across a message.”
Coonerty, who is temporarily termed out at the end of this year, says he thinks publicly financed campaigns work great from an ideological standpoint. But, he adds, there are financial barriers to it on a city level.
“We just scraped together $30,000 to reopen Harvey West Pool for the summer,” Coonerty says. “If we’re going to finance 10 candidates at $25,000 each, you’d lose the pool and a lot of other things.”
Posner, arguing that a public office should be publicly funded, wants to look into reframing campaign finance and finding a way to bring public finance in. If elected, he says he’s going to look for ways to do that.
“Obviously there’s not time to do that for this election,” Posner says, “but if I’m on City Council, I’ll initiate a process by which the community can look at some version of campaign financing or partial campaign public financing.”
