Cincinnati's Opportunity for Effective Campaign Finance Reform.

By Jane Anderson

Campaign finance reform will bring the local elections process and the operation of local government back to the people. It will decrease the impact of big money on mayoral and council elections, foster a more level playing field for candidates, and restore public confidence in government. The paper explains the background of this grassroots effort and the provisions of the proposed charter amendment.

By Jane Anderson Candidate for City Council

On November 6th, Cincinnati voters will have an opportunity to help renew democracy at the local level. By marking their ballot for Issue 6, the Fair Elections Amendment, citizens will be voting to decrease dramatically the impact of big money on council and mayoral elections. The goal is to restore citizen confidence in the local election process and to level the playing field for candidates who do not have access to major financial resources.

I am pleased to acknowledge my part in the reform effort that has resulted in Issue 6, the proposed Amendment to the Cincinnati City Charter. Specifically, as a member of the drafting committee of Citizens For Fair Elections, I worked long hours to draft this proposed amendment. I believe that our careful research and writing has produced a package of reforms that will prove to be effective as well as constitutional.

Contribution limits for individuals, political action committees and political parties making donations to mayoral and council candidates are a key reform within the proposed amendment. The proposal also establishes additional disclosure requirements including the reporting of independent expenditures. In addition, council and mayoral candidates who agree to limit their campaign spending can qualify to receive partial public financing. Finally, the Amendment would put in place an appointed citizen commission to oversee and enforce campaign finance regulations.

Events Leading Up To Issue 6

The road to campaign finance reform in Cincinnati has been long and arduous. After witnessing in the 1980s and early 1990s the steady rise in the cost of council campaigns and the sharp decline of voting in municipal elections, civic groups like the League of Women Voters decided that these trends could no longer be ignored. In the spring of 1994, I was involved with the League of Women Voters when it championed the Charter Amendment that gave City Council the authority to establish campaign finance laws. After voters approved that Amendment, I worked with the League to draw up a series of specific reforms to recommend to City Council. I brought to this assignment my experience and training as a political scientist.

In the fall of 1995, Council adopted a contribution limits ordinance that was very much like the recommendation of the League of Women Voters. That same year, Council also passed an ordinance that placed a limit of $140,000 on what a council candidate could spend to get elected, a direct challenge to the 1976 Supreme Court decision (Buckley versus Valeo) that ruled such limits were unconstitutional. After the passage of these ordinances, I continued as a member of the League to monitor the campaign finance process in Cincinnati. Since these ordinances passed by narrow five to four votes in Council, the potential for future opposition seemed great.

Almost immediately, a former Republican Council candidate challenged the ordinance setting a cap on spending as an infringement of free speech. Due to the Buckley case precedent, a lower federal court ruled in favor of this challenge, and the judge set aside the ordinance while the Kruse versus the City of Cincinnati case awaited a review in a higher court. The contribution limits ordinance, however, was in effect in the 1997 Council Campaign, and overall spending declined by over $400,000, the first downturn in campaign expenditures since the 1970s.

For most of 1998, I played a leadership role in an ongoing grassroots effort to preserve the contributions limits ordinance and to prevent Council from dropping its appeal in the Kruse Case. Councilman Charles Winburn vowed to rescind these ordinances, and he continued to put forward recision ordinances throughout the year. An informal coalition of groups that included the League of Women Voters, the Women's Political Caucus, the Woman's City Club, Dollars and Democracy, Ohio Citizen Action, and Citizens For Civic Renewal emerged to advocate for maintaining these ordinances, and I spoke for this coalition on several occasions before Council's Law Committee.

After successfully defending the ordinances on three separate occasions, local reformers experienced two disheartening events in November and December 1998. First, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the Kruse Case, ending the fight to preserve the ordinance establishing a cap on a council candidate's spending. Next, Councilman Winburn found the fifth vote he needed to rescind the contribution limits ordinance. Although the reform coalition mounted its most organized effort yet to save the reform, Council, nevertheless, abolished the ordinance in mid-December.

The New Reform Initiative

1999 and 2000 were rebuilding years in terms of developing the next steps to restore reform in city elections. I took a leadership role in the informal coalition that came together in January 1999 to begin discussing the next round of campaign finance reform for Cincinnati. With my knowledge of city charters and the initiative process, I was able to serve as a resource to this group as it studied various alternatives. Initially, we researched campaign finance reform models in other cities, and we held several community-wide workshops where we invited experts and representatives from other cities to share their insights with the coalition and other interested community leaders.

After a year and a half of research and public meetings, we came up with an even more comprehensive package of reforms than the rescinded ordinances of 1995. The Fair Elections Coalition next formed a drafting committee that included former Vice Mayor Peter Strauss, Dell Heitkamp of the League of Women Voters, Bill Woods of Citizens For Civic Renewal, and myself. In order to craft a readable, legally correct, and constitutional initiative, we worked closely with two attorneys with expertise in legislative drafting and constitutional law. After going through several drafts and much editing, we finally were ready to take the proposed amendment to the printers last October.

The proposed amendment that I helped draft includes the following reforms. First of all, the initiative would restore contribution limits. The limits would be the same as required in the 1995 ordinance. An individual could contribute $1,000 to a mayoral or council candidate, while the limit for a Political Action Committee would be $2,500. A political party could allocate as much as $10,000.

Since placing a mandatory limit on what a candidate can spend in a campaign is currently unconstitutional, we decided when drafting the new initiative to establish a voluntary cap on spending equal to three times the compensation of a council member or the mayor. The benefit for the candidate for Council or for mayor who accepts the cap on spending would be partial public financing for his or her campaign. When looking for public funding models that already exist in other cities such as Tucson, Arizona and New York City, partial public financing emerged as the most effective and practical approach. We determined that this reform levels the playing field for candidates without access to big money, and it makes candidates who accept public funds more beholden to the general public than to wealthy individual and group donors.

Under our proposal, candidates for council or mayor who accept the spending limit can qualify for a 2 - 1 match of public dollars for every private dollar raised up to 67% of the spending limit. People running for mayor or council, however, must first show they are serious candidates before they qualify for partial public funding. In order to receive public financing, a candidate would not only have to accept the cap on spending but also raise an initial amount of private donations. A council candidate would have to raise $5,000 from at least 150 contributors, while $10,000 from a minimum of 300 contributors is the figure for mayoral candidates.

In terms of public disclosure of campaign contributions, the Fair Elections Amendment includes an additional reporting period not required under state law. Under the Proposal, council and mayoral candidates must report donations 60 days before the election. In addition, the Amendment requires the reporting of independent expenditures made on behalf of candidates (money not raised or spent by a candidate's committee).

A final reform that we drafted for the proposed amendment is an appointed citizen commission to oversee the City's campaign finance laws. In order to avoid the ineffective enforcement procedure of the 1995 ordinance, we decided that a citizen commission similar to the model that works well in New York City would be appropriate here. Although the mayor appoints the commission under this plan, he or she must select one member from a list of three candidates provided by each of the local political parties and two members who are politically independents.

Recent Events

Since last November, Coalition volunteers (now Citizens For Fair Elections) spent long hours at meetings and on street corners collecting the approximately 7,000 signatures of registered voters needed to qualify the proposed amendment for the ballot. For eight months, one-hundred and twenty-five volunteers braved the cold and the heat to solicit these names. This arduous task was completed in July, and City Council placed this initiative on the November ballot at its September 6th meeting.

A lot has happened here and in the nation since I began work on the campaign finance reform issue. The events of September 11th stunned us, and caught us all up in the grieving process after this terrible tragedy. Nevertheless, the attack on America should make us even more determined to preserve our public values that are embodied in our political democracy. This reality makes the passage of Issue 6 more important than ever. Citizens will not feel that the democratic process is working for all the people unless we begin to lessen the influence of big money on elections and government in general. Issue 6 provides us with the opportunity to do just that.

Back in 1995, Cincinnati was recognized for taking a leadership role in the grassroots movement to achieve effective campaign finance reform. In 1998, we saw our hard won efforts vanish. Issue 6, the Fair Elections Amendment, will make us leaders again in 2001, and it will bring the city election process back to the people.