2 Supervisors Call for Curbs on Fund-Raising

Supervisors Zev Yaroslavsky and Yvonne Brathwaite Burke on Wednesday unveiled a broad measure for the November ballot that would reform Los Angeles County’s wide-open system of fund-raising and spending on political campaigns.

The proposal, which would apply to offices from supervisor to district attorney, will be considered at a Board of Supervisors meeting Tuesday. It would impose county government’s first limit on campaign contributions from individuals and special interests and would ban all campaign fund-raising during at least half of a supervisor’s term in office.

The measure would ban all contributions from registered lobbyists and many political action committees, and prohibit anyone from “bundling” contributions from multiple sources and giving them to a candidate.

With no limits in place, members of the board and some top county officials routinely raise more than $1 million to finance their reelection campaigns, much of it in checks of $5,000, $10,000 or more from county unions, developers and companies that do business with or have a direct interest in county decisions.

In the preamble to their proposal, Yaroslavsky and Burke said the measure is needed to limit the influence of special interest contributions, reduce the amount of money spent on political campaigns and reduce the amount of time candidates spend raising campaign funds.

But Ruth Holton, executive director of California Common Cause, said the group has collected enough signatures to place a more sweeping political reform initiative on the state’s general election ballot.

The Common Cause measure has lower contribution limits and tougher restrictions on fund-raising in nonelection years.

“Voters should be very careful,” Holton said of the Yaroslavsky and Burke plan. “From first blush, it doesn’t appear to be as strict as ours.”

Bob Stern, executive director of the private California Commission on Campaign Financing and former chief counsel of the state Fair Political Practices Commission, said the supervisors’ proposal “clearly is not the most far-reaching and comprehensive set of campaign reforms.”

And Fernando Igrejas, a spokesman for the California Public Interest Research Group, which gathered enough signatures to put a severely restrictive campaign reform measure on the state ballot this November, said the supervisors’ plan contains “fat-cat loopholes” and is “too little, too late.”

Yaroslavsky, however, said “the time is right” for the county to establish its own set of “fair and equitable” rules for political campaigns that will “limit the influence of lobbyists and other special interests” while restricting the amount of time officeholders and candidates can raise money.

“Fund-raising can be an extremely time consuming and debilitating endeavor for a public official or candidate,” Yaroslavsky said.

Most supervisors hold an annual fund-raising gala and raise as much in one night as a candidate for governor, U.S. senator or even president. This has allowed them to amass huge war chests.

Burke, who coasted to reelection in March with no opponent, nonetheless raised $760,000 last year to ward off any challengers. “We spend so much time fund-raising just to make ourselves competitive,” she said.

Yaroslavsky and Burke must win the support of at least one of their colleagues to get the measure on the ballot.

Supervisors Gloria Molina, Deane Dana and Mike Antonovich could not be reached for comment.

The complex measure offered by the two supervisors would impose a $200 limit on contributions in county races if the candidate refused to abide by voluntary spending limits. Candidates who agreed to the spending restraints would be able to raise contributions in amounts up to $1,000 for a primary, special or general election campaign.

But the $1,000 limit would jump tenfold for other candidates in any race in which one of the contenders pumped more than $20,000 of his or her own money into the campaign. And if a wealthy candidate gave his or her campaign more than $100,000, there would be no limits for other candidates in the race.

Spending limits would be set at 75 cents per resident of a supervisorial district or 25 cents per resident in countywide races. Given the county’s population of 9.3 million, the limit would be almost $1.4 million in a supervisorial election and more than $2.3 million in a countywide race. The limits would double if any other participant in the race failed to abide by the spending ceilings.

If approved by the voters, the proposal would also prevent the supervisors from raising campaign money until 18 months before or six months after an election. That means the supervisors would be effectively barred from fund-raising during two of their four years in office.

Candidates for the countywide offices of sheriff, assessor and district attorney would be allowed to begin soliciting contributions two years before an election and could continue to raise money six months afterward. That would prevent them from raising money during 18 months of their four-year terms.

“If this proposal were adopted by the board and the Common Cause initiative failed, this would be a step forward,” Stern said. “If the Common Cause initiative passes [along with the county measure], it would be a step backward.”