Healing the wounds
Evidently the New County Politics is going to to require the same old iron stomach.
As opponents of Issue 6 before the election, Democrats FitzGerald, Rokakis and Jones have no business running for executive, said Parma Heights Mayor Martin Zanotti, who was a leading advocate of the reform measure.
“It would be the ultimate hypocrisy to have trashed Issue 6 with the many false claims against it and then turn around and say, ‘I want to lead that government,’ ” said Zanotti…
116,000 people voted against Issue 6. Think Zanotti will let us vote next November?
Maybe we’ll be replaced with some better qualified voters from Geauga County.
Okay, moving on…
What about that topic that Zanotti and Company inadvertently forgot to include in Issue 6… campaign finance reform?
According to the PD, “In the first few months under the charter, council members are expected to tackle a code of ethics and campaign finance reform.” But by then, of course, those County Council members will already be incumbents who’ve already raised a lot of money to run for the job, presumably with the help of the usual suspects. (The new Council districts each have nearly 90,000 registered voters, so effective council campaigns can be expected to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.)
So maybe it would be smarter not to leave the question of campaign finance rules up to them.
Maybe the next order of business for reform-minded county voters should be a Clean Election Initiative.
The new Charter becomes effective at the beginning of 2010, so presumably our new right to initiate legislation becomes effective then as well. But I don’t see any way to actually file petitions for County legislation until the new County Council is seated in January 2011. So it seems unlikely that citizens can create new disclosure roles, set contribution limits, ban solicitation of county employees and contractors, etc. in time to affect the first round of County Executive and Council races.
But we could put a campaign finance reform plan on the same ballot as those races, in the form of an amendment to the new Charter. Ohio Constitution Article 10, Section 4:
Amendments to a county charter or the question of the repeal thereof may also be submitted to the electors of the county in the manner provided in this section for the submission of the question whether a charter commission shall be chosen, to be voted upon at the first general election occurring not sooner than sixty days after their submission.
“The manner provided in this section for the submission of the question whether a charter commission shall be chosen” means submitting petitions with valid signatures of 8% of the county’s 984,000 registered voters.
What should be in a citizen-initiated county campaign finance reform plan? Here’s my personal short list:
- Real-time electronic disclosure of contributions by amount and source. There’s no reason why campaigns can’t record contributions in a public online database as they come in, within 48 or 72 hours.
- A ban on incumbents or challengers taking contributions from county employees, principals of companies with county contracts, and unions or organizations representing county employees or contractors.
- A low ceiling on contributions per candidate per race ($250? $500?) by any individual or organization, including a political action committee.
And, yes…
- A public financing option like they have in (for example) New York City, Tucson, Sacramento, and several states including Arizona and New Jersey.