In spite of its natural outdoor beauty, cultural amenities and quality neighborhoods, our wonderful Little Rock still has its controversies. A recent headline-capturing topic is the November 2018 city election for mayor and whether two potential challengers to our incumbent mayor are violating a good government reform ordinance that prohibits collecting campaign funds prior to five months before election day.
In other words, despite a 1997 city law banning the receipt of any campaign funds before June 1 in an election year, it seems two mayoral candidates already are hard at work doing exactly that. One says he already has raised $150,000.
I was one among many grass-roots advocates in 1995, 1996 and 1997 who strongly and vocally supported the five-month limit for city candidate fundraising. This time limitation is aimed at an age-old problem--far, far too much money in politics! City policies are especially vulnerable to special-interest money because city councils convene almost every week and vote, among other decisions, to rezone land and approve high-dollar contracts to vendors. City council members weekly make decisions that someone else would like to influence with a "campaign donation." In other words, corrupt behavior potentially can emerge 52 times a year!
The "money-in-politics" issue at Little Rock City Hall commanded the spotlight in December 1995 when our grassroots groups learned that a high-stakes rezoning vote on six acres of land near the Shackleford and Kanis roads intersection was entangled with two large "campaign donations" from the land developers seeking the rezoning. City planning staff and the city manager each recommended against the rezoning because the added commercial zoning would compound the existing snarled volume of traffic in the vicinity. City planners said the intersection already was awash with retail zoning, and the six acres of added retail was not justified by any rational planning criteria.
Nonetheless, land developers gave $1,700 to the re-election campaign of one city board member in August 1995 as the rezoning worked its way through City Hall. Remember, the actual campaign was not scheduled until November 1996, 18 months in the future! The same land developers gave an added $1,000 to a second city board member's re-election in October 1995, only a few weeks before the same high-stakes rezoning vote, but 13 months before election day.
The irrational yet successful rezoning and the land developers' tandem big campaign gifts did not go unnoticed. A coalition of grass-roots groups across Arkansas then propelled a door-to-door petition campaign to gather tens of thousands of voter signatures to place a "money-in-politics reform" statute on the November 1996 statewide ballot. Our proposed law reduced allowable campaign donations to $300 for state elected officials and enabled city governments to adopt their own campaign finance limitation ordinances. The reform law captured 487,432 votes (66 percent) in a landslide triumph for clean government.
Three months later in February 1997, the Little Rock City Board adopted the five-month time limit for receiving campaign donations. Year-round "pay-to-play" rezoning ordinances were no more in Little Rock!
You now know the history of Little Rock's reform ordinance to limit money in politics. The reform ordinance was sound in 1997 and it is sound today. Everyone in Little Rock should be proud of its enactment.
As noted earlier, two candidates for mayor now are willfully ignoring this ordinance because they have declared themselves to be "exploratory candidates" (as opposed to real candidates) which allows their "exploratory campaign committees" to lawfully collect campaign funds two years prior to the actual election.
The City Board recently directed the city attorney to ask the Circuit Court for a declaratory judgment by a judge to decide the legal controversy. Last week the circuit judge said the exploratory candidacies were legal but largely ignored the city's reform ordinance. A city appeal to a higher level court may be necessary. I hope the city's ordinance, a genuine light of reform in the darkness of our money-addicted political system, will prevail in the end. Our city elections will be cleaner as a result, just as they have been for the last 21 years since the ordinance was enacted.
Apparently what is inflicting heartburn on the two 2018 mayoral challengers is an ancillary provision of the 1997 reform ordinance that requires candidates to return or donate to charity any "excess campaign funds" (donations less expenses) after election day. All city candidates complied with this city rule until 2010 when the state Legislature redefined "excess funds" as any sum greater than the salary of the public office sought by the candidate.
In 2010 the city attorney acknowledged the new statute and told city candidates about the new rule allowing them to keep a portion of their excess campaign money. In 2018 the mayor's salary is $160,000 per year and the incumbent mayor, Mark Stodola, may lawfully "carry over" an equal sum if he has it. As of this writing, Mayor Stodola, according to his public campaign reports, has approximately $78,000 in "carryover" funds. His two challengers do not like this circumstance despite the fact that it has been allowable under state law for the last eight years. Thus each challenger has employed the "exploratory committee" device to get a running head start.
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Jim Lynch has been active in Little Rock grass-roots politics for 40 years.
Editorial on 03/09/2018