My work on campaign finance reform continues
On the Tuesday, April 5 regularly scheduled Council meeting agenda, an ordinance to repeal the ordinance limiting contribution limits to $100 for Mayoral and Council candidates was placed on the agenda for its first reading. I have put this ordinance forward as a result of Council voting down my proposed legislation to revise the current campaign finance ordinance.
If you’ve been following this topic, then you know that I have previously written a blog about Hudson’s current campaign finance ordinance that lays out the many issues with it, as well as some things I had hoped to address by revising it. If you need a refresher, click here to read the blog.
The revised ordinance we eventually voted on at the March 15 meeting was changed several times from the version I introduced in January. After receiving some initial feedback after Council reviewed my first draft, two of my colleagues on Council (Schlademan and Banweg) agreed to help me work on creating a revised version to bring back to Council. Following this, we implemented even more feedback in a third iteration of the legislation.
I went out of my way to address the feedback that each council member gave in order to achieve compromise and arrive at a version of the legislation that would be palatable to most.
Before Council took a formal vote on the revised legislation, I made it a point to reiterate to Council that this is a difficult thing to regulate at the local level. Political donations are considered a form of speech, so coming up with regulations everyone is happy with while avoiding any regulations that could be argued as unconstitutional is tricky. But this legislation accomplished a lot even if it was lacking in some areas. It more clearly defined the penalty, it raised the limit for at-large and Mayoral races to a reasonable amount, it did place regulations on entities (PACs, political parties, clubs, etc.) to control their influence on elections, but most importantly it cleared up the language and made it easily understandable for even first-time candidates.
One surprising piece of feedback I received from some members of Council was that they felt the legislation was too long, however, that was done intentionally. If you are going to have a law in place, it should be easy to understand and easy to navigate for everyone. It should not require you to search through our codified ordinances for the other pieces and parts.
So, as you may have gathered, this legislation failed 5-2.
When we were first considering the legislation to reform Ordinance 226, I told council that our options were:
To reform the ordinance (this was my preference)
To repeal it
To do nothing
What we know is that there are significant issues with the current ordinance. Because it is confusing, it has resulted in candidates unintentionally, and likely unknowingly, violating it. Because there is no clear penalty listed within the ordinance, you have to search for it (located under general penalties), which has led to candidates wrongly assuming it is “toothless” and “unenforceable.”
Either way, we have a law that is vague and unclear to candidates. I can tell you from experience, running is hard. As it is, there are already state and federal regulations on campaign finances.
Do we want this additional burden of an unclear and outdated law on our candidates who are running to represent us? Making it easier to run for office is a hugely important issue.
The residents of Hudson deserve options at the ballot box. They deserve to have the most qualified candidates, and not have the pool limited to only those who can self-fund. I see this as a voting rights issue at the local level, and solving antiquated problems like this protects democracy.
So, I proposed option #1, and it was voted down.
Because I believe this is an issue worth fixing, I decided that the next step is for us to consider option #2, repealing the current ordinance. I hope my colleagues will seriously consider the legislation I am sponsoring to repeal our antiquated campaign finance ordinance.
If my colleagues vote this down as well, we will know that they intend to do option #3 that I outlined above - nothing.
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Have questions? Want to share your thoughts with me on this issue or a different one? As always, I would love to have a conversation! Email me directly at nkowalski@hudson.oh.us.
