Last-minute contributions show new law’s wisdom

Wednesday afternoon, the 2017 campaign finance filings were made public for all elected officials and candidates in Indiana.

This is the first such filing since passage of the “pay-to-play” ordinance that Councilman John Crawford and I collaborated on last year. The impetus of the ordinance was the accumulation of roughly $1 million of campaign contributions from vendors and contractors to the city of Fort Wayne to the mayor’s campaign.

So of course we would expect that since the bill council passed at much effort (we had to override the pocket veto of the mayor) that there would be significant interest in this filing.

Indiana Policy Review spent a great deal of time and effort identifying the parties that contributed to elections in Fort Wayne for the election cycle ending in 2015. That work provided the framework for the ability for a thorough analysis of this year’s filing in a day’s time.

What we find is roughly the same rate of giving by vendors, nearly all of the $200,000 that was raised in 2017. What was interesting is that nearly $50,000 of that was collected on the last business day of the year to beat the Jan. 1 effective date of our ordinance. This last-minute splurge stands out in comparison to 2016, where there were very few contributions after September.

The reporting that corporate donations totaled $21,000 is true. However, most of the vendors the city contracts with give through limited liability companies and partnerships that do not fall under the state’s campaign finance limitations. The total from LLC, LLP and proprietorships, as well as the individual officers and related parties, came to about $175,000. That is why our ordinance captures all of these types of entities as well.

Is it possible that nearly 30 different contributors (from all over the country) that do business with the city all happened to think: “Hey, let’s send off that campaign check today”? Or was there a concerted effort by the administration, or at least the mayor’s campaign team, to call up these vendors and have them send in their donations before the turn of the calendar?

Perhaps none of this is illegal, but it is certainly unseemly. The people of Fort Wayne deserve to know that this goes on. I for one am glad that our council had the courage to do something about this, and am so looking forward to this day in 2019 to make the comparison.