Anaheim City Council members are changing the city’s campaign finance laws to limit how long candidates can fundraise debt repayment and how much they can loan themselves during elections.
And two city council members are calling for city staff to explore making it easier for residents to see who is spending in local elections and the financing behind the mailers they receive in their mailbox every election season.
“It is an important discussion that we should have about how can we make our elections more transparent and more accessible for the average Anaheim resident that is just getting a lot of information thrown at them,” Mayor Ashleigh Aitken said at Tuesday’s meeting.
On Tuesday, officials voted unanimously to require candidates to repay their debt within a year from the election as well as limit personal campaign loans to $100,000 per election.
[Read: Anaheim Looks to Change How Politicians Raise Money for Campaigns]
The overhaul comes after sworn FBI affidavits and an independent investigation allege Disneyland resort interests exert undue influence on city hall.
Disney has historically heavily financed resort-friendly candidates through their chief political spending vehicle, the Support Our Anaheim Resort (SOAR) political action committee.
Since 2018, Disney’s spent at least $1 million in every election cycle through the committee to help bolster campaigns with digital advertising and political mailers.
Will it Be Easier to See Who’s Financing Campaigns?
City council members also considered requiring political action committees to notify their candidates and the city clerk of any mailers or digital ads worth $1,000 in support or against a candidate 24 hours before they run and put it on the city website.
But the proposal didn’t get support.
Aitken said she was fine with dropping the notification proposal, but wants to create a system on the city website that makes it easier for residents to navigate campaign finance forms and information.
“I would like to be able to create some type of database or some type of portal on our website where if I am a resident that does not have a background in election law, I can go on and I can easily navigate who is putting out some of these mailers, who is behind them, who are the major funders and what is being said,” she said.
City Councilman Carlos Leon also said the campaign finance disclosures should be easier to navigate.
“Having something that’s more accessible to people so they don’t have to click through 20 things,” he said.
City Councilmembers Natalie Meeks and Natalie Rubalcava – both of whose campaigns were heavily supported financially by SOAR – pushed back against that idea of notification arguing it would lead to problems.
“It creates opportunities for potential mischief,” Meeks said, adding that campaigns could use the disclosure as a play to throw their opponents off a political strategy.
She also said the city’s overall website needs to be overhauled.
“I just searched for independent expenditure and it came up with a contract for being a recreation class instructor,” Meeks said.
Council members Stephen Faessel and Norma Campos Kurtz also spoke against the notification proposal.
Rubalcava, who will likely face a recall election, said the notification proposal could give credibility to negative mailers and ads by putting them on the city website.
“As a person who has had a lot of negative things about me out there that are not true this does concern me,” she said.
Leon said political action committees who spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on mailers and candidates are the ones who hold the power.
“I don’t think more disclosure is necessarily going to take you up a notch in that sense,” he said, agreeing with Aitken on making campaign finance forms easier to navigate.
A Push For Change
Changes to city campaign finance laws was one of the final reform proposals the city council considered last fall after a series of other reform debates like hiring an ethics officer and requiring in-house lobbyists to register with the city.
It is also the one proposal on the table activists said was necessary to curb the outsized influence of the city’s largest campaign spender – Disney.
State legislators shortly after the sworn FBI affidavits surfaced bolstered the Levine Act – a state campaign finance law – by applying it to local city councils.
The law now requires city council members to recuse themself from a vote that impacts donors who have contributed to their campaign in the last 12 months.
Amid recent council debates on campaign finance reform in Anaheim over the past few months, officials also debated a similar recusal rule that would apply to political action committee spending.
But City Attorney Rob Fabela in the past has said a political action committee recusal rule is unprecedented and could land the city in court. But he’s also previously said it shouldn’t conflict with existing law either.
There have been pushes for other changes as well.
Shirley Grindle, a resident who authored the county’s own campaign finance ordinance in 1978 that was later adopted by Anaheim, has been calling on city council members to also implement a gift ban.
“It’s the best thing you guys could do to show the public that you’re not in the pockets of people who give to you,” she said at Tuesday’s meeting.
The council has not called for a discussion on a gift ban.
Editor’s note: Ashleigh Aitken’s father, Wylie Aitken, chairs Voice of OC’s board of directors.
Hosam Elattar is a Voice of OC reporter and corps member with Report for America, a GroundTruth initiative. Contact him at helattar@voiceofoc.org or on Twitter @ElattarHosam.
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