Point Austin: Chasing the Money
Austin campaign finance reform is much less than meets the eye
By Michael King, Fri., March 24, 2006
And if you call today, I can sell you the First Street Bridge at a really good price.
Virtually everybody involved in local politics agrees that City Council term limits (enacted in 1994) and campaign contribution limits (enacted in 1997) have not worked out as promised by their proponents. Even those who continue to support the reforms admit they could use some tinkering, as both the two-term limit and the $100 contribution restriction seem increasingly onerous. Hence, two of the propositions on the May 13 ballot: Prop. 4 would amend the city charter to allow three terms instead of two (beginning with council members elected this year); Prop. 5 would raise the individual contribution limits to $300 and double the limits on overall out-of-town contributions to $30,000, and otherwise make it easier for candidates to raise sufficient funds to run citywide – and somewhat independently of the political action committees that have stepped into the financial void created by so dramatically restricting individual contributions. (There is also discussion of limits on the PACs, but opinion is divided whether that's doable or legally enforceable.)
I'll support term limits when and only when they apply to everybody. As long as private suzerains like Hector Ruiz, Beau Armstrong, and Michael Dell are able indefinitely to dictate major economic and planning decisions that determine the daily lives, not only of their own "employees" (that's French for "the used") but entire regions of citizens, I want to be able to vote for political leaders who've been able over time to accumulate sufficient political capital to at least occasionally provide a counter-balance to accumulated financial capital. And if they screw up, I very much want to retain the only term limit that should matter: my vote.
No Candidates Need Apply
If we needed more evidence that the campaign contribution limits are broken, the withdrawal last week of Hector Uribe from the Place 2 campaign to replace term-limited Raul Alvarez should be plenty. The election is almost two months distant, but former state legislator Uribe saw that he had not garnered sufficient endorsements from the PACs, now the major players in city campaign finance. Though he'd been actively running for some weeks, Uribe concluded that his candidacy was no longer viable and decided not to file. He and campaign treasurer Alfred Stanley published an op-ed in the Statesman March 14 ("We couldn't play the city's game, so we're out") arguing that the PACs – especially those established by the police and firefighter unions – now predetermine who will run (and largely who will win), because unless a candidate is personally wealthy, nonincumbents simply cannot raise enough quickly enough in $100 donations to counter-balance the underwriting (and independent spending) of the PACs. "If the purpose of the Austin campaign charter amendment was to prevent the rich and powerful from making deals in the proverbial smoke-filled room," Uribe and Stanley wrote, "then perhaps we should consider whether we have simply substituted the PACs for the large contributors."
I'm somewhat skeptical of the awesome financial power now attributed to the PACs, some of which carping has been reflexive union-bashing, especially by the Statesman. Last year, in the only competitive race, Place 3, the supposedly all-powerful Austin-Police-Association-PACs-endorsed candidate (Gregg Knaupe) couldn't even get into the run-off. Nonetheless, in that run-off, the shift of APA PAC money – much of it in fact indirectly laundered from Real Estate Council sources that have gone politically underground since the mid-Nineties – to Jennifer Kim, had a great deal to do with the final outcome and the defeat of the developer-dreaded Margot Clarke.
So I'm not naïve about the money. But for precisely that reason I find it hard to drink the campaign finance reform Kool-Aid. In U.S. politics, at all levels – absent a real public finance system, not on the horizon – money still rules. Locally, the precampaign campaign – when the candidate wannabes meet with the folks with the real money – largely determines who will have sufficient funds to run a citywide campaign, and drives away other legitimate competitors (like Uribe), leaving only the anointed favorites, surrounded by a brace of better-dressed but equally penniless versions of Jennifer Gale. That's why we had only one competitive council race last year, and only two of four races will be reasonably competitive this year.
"When they were passing those contribution limits," Stanley told me this week, "I told them that all they were doing was protecting incumbents and empowering the PACs. They've certainly done that, and that's bad enough. But what's worse," he added, "is that they've disempowered the candidates."
What Reform?
Whatever you think of the other Place 2 candidates, Uribe should have been a viable city council candidate, and his absence from the available choices is a real blow to local politics. In addition to campaign finance reform ("It's just not a level playing field"), Uribe wanted to talk about more engaged public governance, about single-member districts ("We should double the size of the council, and go to a blended system"), the looming city fight over public safety costs ("Public safety has PACs, libraries don't"), about the "paternalism" of the "gentlemen's agreement" on minority council seats, even about what he sees as the increasingly precarious state of the local film industry. Some of those things will get discussed over the next two months, but now some of them won't.
In any case, we will have lost the knowledge and input and voice of an experienced politician and citizen, who undoubtedly has much to add to the public discussion. "The '97 ordinance makes it very difficult to raise money independently of the PACs, and then the failure of the local media – including the Statesman, the Chronicle, and television – to really engage the campaign process early enough, make it difficult to get your message out without that money," Uribe told me. "So what we have now, is an extra-political system that is electing the candidates before they file."
That system might be called many things. "Reformed" is not one of them. 
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