High Costs of Campaigning Taking a Toll

In this city, where politicians say it takes $100,000 just to be a contender for municipal office, the cost of winning and maintaining council seats is starting to take its toll.

Council members claim that the hundreds of thousands of dollars pouring into city campaign coffers has done little more than enhance the perception that big contributions have colored decision-making at City Hall.

And Mayor Fred Hunter, who alone has raised more than $575,000 since entering the local political scene in 1984, flatly states that contributions have influenced city policy decisions.

“The perception is that the City Council is being bought,” Hunter said in a recent interview. “That perception is sometimes a reality. When the general public sees us collecting $200,000 for a $700-per-month job, the question is: Why?”

The mayor said he would not comment on any possible improprieties that he has witnessed in his more than five years on the council, but he said the intensity of recent political pressure--especially in the form of campaign contributions from developers, government employee associations and other special interest groups--has become “outrageous.”

Following a sweeping national trend in which voters have expressed their displeasure with incumbents and their finances, some Anaheim officials are calling for a campaign-spending cap at $50,000 per candidate for each election cycle and a council term limit of eight years.

Hunter said he hopes that the charter-amendment proposals can be placed before the voters by June.

Councilman Bob D. Simpson, who has already announced his intention to leave office after his first term, said he, too, will support the amendments and believes that the perception of local government officials has been tarnished as campaign accounts have grown.

Indeed, a computer-assisted investigation of Anaheim campaign contributions by The Times Orange County Edition shows that since their initial candidacies and subsequent terms in office, the five council members have received more than $2 million in contributions recorded since 1984.

And Councilman Irv Pickler, the most successful fund-raiser on the council with $636,000 collected since 1984, said he has seen amounts needed to wage winning campaigns quadruple since the early 1980s--from $50,000 to $200,000 today.

Simpson, elected last fall and who has raised $147,000 in the past two years alone, said the city is particularly vulnerable to allegations of influence-peddling given the number of multimillion-dollar capital improvement projects under way or planned for Anaheim. Those projects include the $100-million sports arena, now under construction, and ongoing negotiations for the proposed $3-billion Disneyland expansion.

“Obviously, Anaheim is a place where a lot is happening,” the councilman said. “The amount of money that is spent in Anaheim, and particularly Anaheim, is an obscenity. I don’t know any council member whose vote can be bought for money, but the danger is in creating the perception that something like that can happen.”

If the city chooses to pursue the charter amendments, especially the spending cap, the effort is expected to face legal obstacles.

Bob Stern of the California Commission on Campaign Financing said there is ample federal precedent to turn back a city-imposed spending limit unless provisions are made to provide some form of public funding for campaigns.

“You just can’t tell candidates how much they can spend,” Stern said. “Jurisdictions are very frustrated by this.”

Shirley Grindle, Orange County’s leading advocate for campaign reform and the author of TINCUP and an expanded county contribution limit being considered by the Board of Supervisors, said because of the legal obstacles, Anaheim’s attempt would probably amount to “whistling Dixie.”

“The fact that it would be a vote of the people doesn’t cut the mustard,” Grindle said. “It is very, very clear that you cannot control the amount of money a candidate spends.”

Hunter said he is aware of potential legal problems but would “rather roll the dice and risk the challenges.”

As important, the mayor said, is the issue of term limits, which he would seek to place on the same ballot with the spending-cap proposal.

“The longer you stay in office, the more susceptible you become to corruption,” said Hunter, who is an attorney and former police officer. “I believe in this new slogan, ‘Eight (years in office) is enough.’ ”

Attempts at currying favor with local council members is not a new phenomenon, especially in the city where Mickey Mouse is king and Disney’s hospitality for Anaheim’s elected and staff officials has been a legacy of largess.

For more than 30 years, the Disney entertainment giant had treated nearly every top city official to annual overnight trips to San Diego, where the party--nicknamed the Anaheim Ichthyological, Sour Mash & 5-Card Draw Society--was given the run of the Hotel del Coronado, from sumptuous cookouts to massages.

Although the practice was stopped this year out of concern for how it could be perceived amid the ongoing park expansion negotiations, the annual trip became a tradition for most city officials and probably best illustrates how Disney has maintained its dominant presence in the community.

With the booming growth of the city in recent years, builders and developers have followed Disney’s lead and have, according to the council members themselves, become golf partners, dinner companions and faithful contributors to council campaigns.

“The inherit danger is that there is too much influence by a particular group,” Simpson said. “And that group is usually spelled developers. “

Council members claim that two of the city’s most successful fund-raisers are Frank Elfend and Carmen Morinello, who as a team have worked for several developers on efforts to win council approval for their projects. The Times analysis shows that since 1986, the two men, their consulting and legal firms, and the clients they represent before the city have combined to contribute more than Anaheim’s largest business interests, including Disneyland.

Pickler said soliciting donations has become a “necessary evil.”

“I take just as much as anybody else,” Pickler said. “You can’t get elected if you don’t have any money.”

The councilman said he probably would not support the charter amendments proposed by his colleagues.

“I don’t think anybody should be able to tell you how much you are going to spend,” Pickler said. “If I want to go out and spend $60,000 or $70,000 of my own money, you shouldn’t be able to restrict that. . . . It’s a shame. People running against you have that money too.”

But ironically, it is Hunter, having once made no secret of his ambitions for higher office, who now talks of how the pressures of fund raising played a major role in his previously announced decision to leave political office in 1994.

Hunter said the city’s current system of political fund raising, which places no limitations on donations or spending, “breeds persons who can get more susceptible to corruption.”

“The only people who can afford to give this kind of money are the developers,” the mayor said. “Where do you think Frank (Elfend) and Carmen (Morinello) get the money? They get it from developers.”

“They (developers) expect that you are going to drop everything else and go listen to them,” said the mayor, describing the desired aim of large political donations. “Somewhere down the line, we’re going to have to put the brakes on.”

At the same time, Hunter admits that he gives priority to telephone calls from such donors as Disneyland President Jack Lindquist, Los Angeles Rams Executive Vice President John Shaw and California Angels Executive Vice President Jackie Autry when they call his downtown law office.

“If you are going to be truthful, let’s not skirt the issue,” Hunter said.

He said his charter amendments “get rid of all the lobbyists and developers. The way to stop the cancer is to put a limit on spending and put a limit on terms.”

Hunter said he is so uncomfortable with what he believes is the public’s “declining” perception of political service that he has quit identifying himself as Anaheim’s mayor on out-of-town trips.

“When I go someplace, I tell them my name is Fred, not Mayor Fred Hunter. Isn’t that a shame? Politicians are lower than insurance people. Politicians are at rock bottom.

“There are no ethics in politics. There are no ethics in Anaheim politics.”

How This Study Was Conducted

Figures for this Dollar Politics report were developed during a Times Orange County Edition investigation that used a computer to categorize seven years of contributions to current members of the Anaheim City Council.

Using disclosure statements that candidates are required to file with the Anaheim city clerk, the study identified about 8,500 campaign expenditures and contributions made to the current council.

The information was edited to correct typographical errors, remove duplicate entries and confirm links between related organizations and contributors that had gone by different names during the study period. Where any links were unclear, those contributions were not categorized, so in some cases the findings are deliberately understated.

The computer research was performed by staff writer Mark Landsbaum, while staff writer Kevin Johnson reported and wrote the story.