Panel Calls for Campaign Cost Reforms

Deploring that legislative campaign spending in last year’s elections was up 31% over 1984, a bipartisan citizens’ commission called Tuesday for a financing reform law to limit skyrocketing costs and give challengers a fighting chance against incumbents.

Total spending jumped to an all-time high of $57.1 million for the 1986 primary and general elections from $43.65 million two years ago, according to the California Commission on Campaign Financing, a privately financed group of civic and political leaders.

All incumbent legislative candidates also were reelected for the first time since 1952.

“Rising campaign spending is forcing candidates to raise larger and larger sums of money,” said Los Angeles attorney Francis M. Wheat, “often creating the unsavory appearance of quid pro quo between legislators and large contributors.

“The model law proposed by the commission would cap escalating election costs and start to equalize competition between challengers and incumbents.”

Among other things, the commission proposed limiting contributions and expenditures in legislative races, prohibiting fund raising in non-election years, banning transfer of funds between candidates and using public matching funds for candidates who agree to curtail their spending.

A similar plan, by Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco), died on the Assembly inactive shelf last year. A proposed initiative, co-sponsored by some members of the commission, failed to attract enough signatures to qualify it for the ballot.

Brown has said he will try to push his plan again this year in the wake of the mail fraud conviction of former Democratic Assemblyman Bruce E. Young of Norwalk for failing to report outside income while he was a legislator and for laundering campaign contributions to Assembly colleagues.

The commission also reported that a record high five races for Senate and Assembly seats cost more than $2 million each last year and seven others exceeded $1 million. Before 1986, only one legislative race in state history had cost more than $2 million and nine races had cost more than $1 million.

The largest individual total was $2.8 million, spent in hotly contested reelection race between Sen. Dan McCorquodale (D-San Jose) and Santa Clara County Supervisor Tom Legan, his Republican opponent.

A $2.1-million mark was set in a Sacramento open Assembly seat battle won by Republican Tim Leslie, a Carmichael businessman, who defeated Democrat Jack Dugan, director of crime prevention for the attorney general’s office, who was helped by $725,000 of Brown’s money.

The record high amount ever spent in a legislative race still is the $3 million shelled out in 1982 by Assemblyman Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica) and his losing Republican opponent, William Hawkins.

Commission members include Los Angeles attorney Mickey Kantor, a long-time Democratic Party election strategist, and Robert T. Monagan, president of the California Economic Development Commission, once a Republican Speaker of the Assembly.