Jennifer Kim’s campaign consultant, Elliott McFadden, appears to be in deep prevaricator’s doo-doo. According to the Public Utility Commission, he could be liable for fines of up to $1,000 a day – perhaps stretching back for years.
According to Terry Hadley, a spokesman for the Public Utility Commission, Ignite Consulting (owned by McFadden) filed only this Monday for a required permit to operated its automated calling (ADAD) service. Yet the campaign consulting firm, founded in 2003, has long provided robocalls for candidates and other clients and lists “automated calling services” as one of its primary services.
McFadden directly told this reporter, and represented to media at a press conference at city hall Wednesday, that the PUC had assured Ignite there was “no problem” with the controversial “Hi, this is your neighbor, Lisa” robo call that Ignite sent out last weekend on Kim’s behalf, attacking Kim’s opponent Randi Shade.
But in fact, said Hadley, Ignite Consulting had come into the PUC on Monday to apply – extremely belatedly – for a basic permit, not to get its script approved. “The PUC does not approve scripts,” said Hadley. “We never saw any kind of script, or knew what might have been said on the message,” he clarified. “The permit should have been obtained in advance, and that was not done.” The application Monday was for a new permit, not a renewal.
The automated call was not identified as coming from the Kim campaign – but that’s a PUC requirement, which permit-holders must follow, Hadley said. He added that the PUC will investigate, only if and when a formal complaint is filed.
While the Kim campaign has claimed that “Lisa” is a real person, they have not produced Lisa.
The Public safety unions and EMS employees have stated that the “Lisa” call and mailers contained “an outright lie”: The claim that Randi Shade received their endorsement based on specific budget commitments for public safety spending.
The public safety unions and Shade have stated repeatedly that Shade did not make hard budgetary commitments. The best supporting evidence the Kim campaign could produce for its claim (at its embarrassingly lame press conference Wednesday) was a second-hand statement from an old Austin Police Association press release: “Shade has called for an increase in resources devoted to fire protection in downtown Austin, and supports expanding the number of Austin patrol officers and EMS personnel.” Those general goals – without specific dollar figures or dates attached – are shared by many citizens, city council members and candidates.
Mark Nathan, who is running the Shade campaign, said that the Austin Firefighter’s Association (which endorsed Shade) will meet with an attorney Friday to discuss how to proceed with filing a complaint (or several) against Ignite. That’s for the anonymous robocall and for operating without a permit. Light a match to Ignite!
This article appears in May 2 • 2008.