Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Public Financing topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Ethics Commission staff report details 2018 public financing, third-party spending and planned review
Summary
Staff told the San Francisco Ethics Commission that public financing covered roughly $2.6 million of mayoral campaign funds in June 2018, publicly financed candidates relied on public funds for about half of campaign resources, and staff will bring phase-2 recommendations on program rules next month.
The San Francisco Ethics Commission on Wednesday reviewed a staff report summarizing how the city's public financing program was used in the 2018 elections and a related program review that could change contribution matching, spending limits and eligibility rules.
Pat Ford, senior policy analyst for the commission, said the report is descriptive rather than prescriptive: "This report is not part of the commission's ongoing review of the public financing program. This is really meant to describe or just provide numbers and information." He told commissioners the report will be submitted to the mayor and board of supervisors the following Monday.
Staff presented election-by-election statistics. In the June 2018 mayoral contest there were 11 ballot candidates; six applied for public financing and five were certified. Two nonincumbent mayoral candidates received the program's maximum for their class, $975,000 each, and staff said total public financing for the mayoral race was about $2,600,000. Combining public funds and private contributions restricted to $500 donors, Ford said mayoral candidates together had roughly $5,800,000 in total funds.
Ford also described how spending limits interact with outside spending, noting the commission adjusts a candidate's spending limit when opponent contributions or third-party activity push totals above the agreed cap. In 2018 staff counted multiple spending-limit increases: "There were a total of 30 increases" in the mayoral race and many more across the other contested seats.
Third-party activity was a notable factor. For the June races staff reported about $2,100,000 of supportive third-party spending and roughly $400,000 in opposition spending, for about $2.5 million in total third-party activity across those contests. Ford said the vast majority of third-party dollars were supportive rather than oppositional, and that independent expenditures and member communications are all counted for purposes of spending-limit adjustments.
The report applied the same format to the November 2018 supervisorial races. Staff said 22 supervisorial candidates ran in the even-numbered districts, 11 applied for public financing and nine received it; staff identified 122 spending-limit adjustments in November, and combined with June's adjustments that produced 165 total changes in 2018.
Ford said the office will continue its program review in a second phase and plans to bring preliminary, concept-level recommendations to the commission at the next meeting. Potential changes under consideration include the matching ratio for contributions and whether to limit the amount matched (for example, matching $100 or $200 rather than the full $500), along with considerations of how much funding candidates should be able to receive and when funds are disbursed.
Staff also flagged related work: planned revisions to implement an anti-corruption and accountability ordinance, new disclosure requirements for trustee elections, and a public-facing effort to improve how information about online political ads and disclaimers is presented to users.
Commissioners asked for follow-up data on topics such as whether ranked-choice voting affects the pattern of opposition spending and how the controller's office calculates residency used to set the public-financing appropriation. Ford agreed to pursue those data points as part of phase 2.
