LA Politics
By Bob Gelfand
On April 11, City Watch published an article by Dennis Hathaway introducing the concept of "clean money," the semi-ironic term used to describe a plan for full public financing of election campaigns.
 Its goal is to remove, as far as possible, the influence of private
campaign contributions on the way our City Council functions. Everyone
who has been around the block a couple of times understands the
suffocating effect that the current "pay to play" system has on honest
decision making.
If you don't believe it, just look at the pittance paid by billboard companies to the City of Los Angeles for rights to more than ten thousand signs. Then consider that this is just one of the politically connected (read: substantial donor of campaign funds) industries in our town. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to see that a few hundred thousand dollars worth of campaign contributions have paid off to the tune of millions of dollars in uncollected taxes on billboards alone. The taxes have been uncollected because they were never levied to begin with. It's not that the taxes would be unreasonable, but that companies which write big checks to political candidates are allowed to collect favors down the road. Elected officials like to refer to themselves as public servants, but we may rightfully inquire as to whom they really serve.
How can we fix this problem? It is surely one of the oldest questions faced by Americans over our centuries of existence, and until recently there were very few useful ideas. Over the past decade, however, a system has been adopted in a few other places that seems to do the job well. It has support among conservatives and liberals alike where it has been tried.
First, a brief description of what this "clean money" system is supposed to be, and then an equally brief introduction to the great debate that will inevitably accompany our attempts to introduce it in Los Angeles. Finally, an even briefer response to an outraged letter writer who protested Mr. Hathaway's article in our letters section.
The idea behind full public financing is that candidates who take money only from public sources are not beholden to special interests. It actually wouldn't cost much to do public financing, particularly when you compare it to the costs of running a police department or bureau of sanitation. We estimate that full public financing for the City Council and mayoral elections would cost less than one-half of one percent of the city's budget. That's less than one part in 200, and potentially as little as one part in 1000.
What would we achieve if we could put such a program in place? What are the difficulties? These are weighty questions which will require careful argument in the months to come, but for the moment we can begin to sketch out the story in brief.
The most serious challenge to adopting full public financing is figuring out how to filter out the wannabe candidates who are -- how can we put this delicately -- the flakes, the Nazis, the weirdo's, the true lunatics? This objection typically goes something like this: "Do you expect us to pay our hard earned tax dollars so that David Duke can run for office?" (Duke was famous as the Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard who ran for Congress and was repudiated by his own political party.) Luckily for us, the people of Arizona and Maine have shown that there is a system that works well not only in filtering out the truly objectionable, but more to the point, in delivering outstanding people such as Governor Janet Napolitano as clean money candidates.
So how do Arizona and Maine do it? Basically, the requirement is that every clean money candidate must collect a certain number of signatures from eligible voters, and with each signature, a small monetary contribution from that signer. Different regions specify different amounts, but the original clean money requirement was five dollars. For a candidate for the state legislature, a few hundred signatures and five dollar bills would be the threshold. For a statewide office such as governor, it would be quite a lot more. In the City of Los Angeles, we might imagine requiring that candidates for city council seats collect 500 signatures and the same number of five-spots.
This simple little system actually works quite well as a way to filter out those flakes and gadflies. It's actually quite a lot of work to collect even a couple of dozen signatures when you are a candidate, and convincing your neighbors to donate real money raises the bar even further.
Qualifying candidates receive funding and, as part of the deal, they promise that they will not spend any other funds in getting elected.
Suffice it to say that this system has been shown to work well in the states that have given it a try. The system not only filters, it has another surprisingly beneficial effect: As voters get used to having clean money candidates on the ballot, they come to expect a lot more from them. The voters expect candidates to actually listen, and the candidates find that under full public financing, they now have the time to engage with people.
Put it this way: In most places run under the traditional system, candidates for congress or the state legislature typically spend half their time grubbing for money. Under the clean money system, they don't.
There is another beneficial consequence exemplified by Maine. The voters have remade the electoral culture of that state to one in which clean money candidates are, by and large, viewed as the more trustworthy. In short, the system has become self-reinforcing, because voters perceive that full public financing results in better government.
There’s a lot more to say on this topic, and we expect to explore the pros and cons over time. But for now, let's consider the response to Dennis Hathaway's piece that was printed in CityWatch as a letter. The writer wonders where the "specified number of qualifying contributions" are going to come from, and answers his own query that it will be special interests. May we suggest that this is a misunderstanding. The whole point of the system is to filter our candidates through all of us not-so-special interests. We might rephrase the question and ask how seed money for any campaign can be clean, and answer that it is clean when it comes from us.
The letter writer further suggests that such a program will be very costly, but our figures argue otherwise. Lastly, our letter writer suggests that once the elected office holders get their hands on this process, they will waste more and more of our tax money on their own campaigns. We have two responses to this: First, we point out that if the City Council increases funding for their own reelection campaigns, they are also increasing funding the same amount for their opponents. And those opponents may very well use their campaign funds to call for cuts in such expenditures. Second, we know from real world experience that where the system has been tried, it results in more government responsiveness rather than less. More on California Clean Money at caclean.org.
(Bob Gelfand is a board member of the Coastal San Pedro Neighborhood Council and a representative to the L.A. Neighborhood Council Coalition. Gelfand is a CityWatch contributor.) _
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