California’s campaign finance laws have become a tool of abuse against citizens participating in their government.
That’s the only conclusion that can be drawn from the latest ruling in a long-running case in Redondo Beach involving a developer’s effort to build a huge project on the waterfront.
While the First Amendment guarantees the right of citizens to distribute flyers, seek signatures on petitions and buy advertising to support a candidacy or cause, in California these constitutionally protected activities could put you at risk of massive fines and financially devastating lawsuits.
In the post-Watergate era, various reformers thought it would be a good idea to regulate campaign finance in order to limit the influence of big money. Voters in California approved the Political Reform Act in 1974, creating a new agency, the Fair Political Practices Commission, to write regulations and enforce the new law. Additionally, California sometimes allows private attorneys to enforce laws by filing lawsuits against individuals or entities.
The much-amended Political Reform Act is wildly complex. The case in Redondo Beach involved the regulations governing the different types of campaign committees and which ones apply to which types of political participation.
In the summer of 2016, some Redondo residents were organizing opposition to a plan by developer CenterCal Properties, LLC, for a large project on the waterfront. A proposed initiative aiming to block the development gained traction and became Measure C on the March 7, 2017, ballot.
On the way to getting the ballot measure qualified and eventually passed, a number of citizens in Redondo took various actions in support of it. A group called Rescue Our Waterfront, led by Wayne Craig and Martin Holmes, formed a committee. Then-candidates Bill Brand and Nils Nehrenheim, later elected (and re-elected) mayor and city councilman, respectively, helped with signature gathering and provided other support for the effort. Rescue Our Waterfront supported the election of Brand and Nehrenheim and added their names to a political mailer.
What we have here is a group of citizens who share a viewpoint and are participating in politics. This is core First Amendment activity. Fine, right?
Not so fast. Rescue Our Waterfront’s organizers were initially confused about whether they were forming a “general purpose committee” or a “primarily formed committee.” They erroneously checked both boxes on their Statement of Organization form, but later corrected it. ROW was a “general purpose committee,” and it was not controlled by any candidate.
Fine, right? Not so fast.
After Measure C passed, two Redondo residents, Arnette Travis and Chris Voisey, filed a lawsuit against the ROW committee, Brand, Nehrenheim, and a volunteer, Linda Moffat, who had served as Brand’s campaign treasurer. The lawsuit charged that the candidates had secretly controlled the ROW committee, that the committee was the wrong type of committee, and that the committee name violated the Political Reform Act.
It’s expensive to sue or be sued. Travis and Voisey testified during the trial that they were not paying the lawyer who was representing them, Bradley W. Hertz of The Sutton Law Firm. They testified that they did not know who was paying for the lawsuit.
In a dramatic scene, L.A. County Superior Court Judge Malcolm H. Mackey ordered Hertz to take the witness stand himself and answer the question under oath: Who was paying for the lawsuit? Reluctantly, the lawyer testified that the developer was writing the checks.
Judge Mackey ruled in favor of ROW, Brand, Nehrenheim and Moffat, finding that ROW was correctly designated as a “general purpose committee,” was not candidate-controlled, and had not violated the law. The court ordered Voisey and Travis to pay the defendants’ costs, including attorney fees of more than $860,000. Further, Mackey ruled that because the “true entity and persons” behind the lawsuit were the developer and its two principals, using Voisey and Travis as “sham clients and shell plaintiffs,” the developer was also responsible for paying the defendants’ costs. Voisey, Travis and the CenterCal team appealed the decision.
Last week, a three-judge panel of the California Court of Appeal ruled in favor of ROW, Brand, Nehrenheim and Moffat. The court’s 32-page ruling reveals a degree of puzzlement about the underlying issue in the case. “We understand this argument to be about voters’ relative trust in each type of committee,” the court wrote. “The hypothesis must be that voters are more willing to trust general purpose committees, which are oriented to general and long-term ideals, like supporting slow-growth development. Conversely, the supposition must be that voters are warier of primary purpose committees, which may exist only briefly and thus lack accountability, and may be opportunistically and singularly driven to pass a measure. Similarly, the hypothesis must be that voters have more trust in committees that are independent from candidates. This at any rate appears to be the general idea.”
But that “general idea,” when enforced as a campaign finance law, enabled a big-money interest to go after two local candidates, a volunteer treasurer and two citizen activists who didn’t do anything illegal, yet were forced to run up more than $800,000 in legal fees to defend themselves.
It gets worse. The appeals court said the developer couldn’t be held responsible for paying the defendants’ costs, because there’s nothing illegal about secretly funding a lawsuit.
During the trial, two expert witnesses took opposite sides of the argument over whether ROW had formed the correct type of committee. It’s an illustration of the irrational complexity that the expert who was determined to be wrong is a former chair of the Fair Political Practices Commission.
The more closely you look at the Political Reform Act, the more clear it becomes that the law is achieving the opposite of what voters intended.
Restore the First Amendment in California. Repeal the Political Reform Act.
Susan Shelley is an editorial writer and columnist for the Southern California News Group. Susan@SusanShelley.com. Twitter: @Susan_Shelley
from Irvine Business Signs https://ift.tt/3lVewZy
via Irvine Sign Company
