Municipal Campaign Disclosure Laws, Budgets, and Priorities

Laws are highly over-rated. This is one reason why the City Ethics Model Code Project is not just about codes, but the centerpiece of a wide-ranging discussion of all the issues involved in creating, improving, and maintaining local government ethics programs.

Laws may be too highly over-rated, but budgets and priorities are too often under-rated. Take Denver. Denver requires political candidates to disclose the employers and occupations of anyone who gives them $200 or more. And yet, as the mayor's campaign manager told the Rocky Mountain News, 'In all the campaigns that I've acted as treasurer, I've never received an audit request from the clerk and recorder's office.'

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So guess what? There is limited compliance with the law. The clerk's office complains of a staffing shortage, but there is also an issue of priorities. I'm sure there are many areas of the clerk's duties that are fully covered, while campaign duties are ignored. In fact, the interim clerk said that she didn't know candidates were failing to report as required until told that by the newspaper. Perhaps newspapers too are under-rated. There would be no municipal ethics without them, and municipalities with weak or loyal newspapers often have serious ethics problems.

The city clerk is an elected office in Denver as in many municipalities. But elected or appointed, the clerk is an important political office rarely without political interest. It is questionable whether authority over campaign matters should be in the hands of a clerk rather than an independent body or auditor, neither elected with nor appointed by politicians.

By the way, the same article shows that electing municipal auditors might not be the right way to go. The Denver auditor is reporting only his donors' employers, not their occupations. So that, for example, a donor listed as employed by a law firm is not shown to be the corporate lobbyist he is.

What experiences have you had with clerks, auditors, or bodies in overseeing campaign disclosure rules?