Thomas Breen file photo
Liam Brennan, at right, on the mayoral campaign trail.
If not for a questioned $383.08 claim, Liam Brennan would have up to another $11,575.56 right now for his mayoral campaign.
That $383.08 claim will need to be decided before Brennan can qualify for matching public dollars for his quest to win the Democratic mayoral nomination — and for New Haven’s “clean elections” system to decide a precedent for future campaigns.
This will take a moment to explain.
Warning: It’s wonky. But kind of interesting, if you’re interested in the rules for how campaigns should be financed.
Brennan is one of three candidates seeking to challenge two-term incumbent Justin Elicker for the Democratic nomination in a Sept. 12 primary. Three of the candidates, including Brennan, have signed up to participate in the voluntary New Haven Democracy Fund (NHDF), the local public financing program that provides an initial public grant and matching funds to eligible mayoral candidates who agree to cap individual donations at $445 and swear off contributions from political committees.
Elicker and Democratic candidate Shafiq Abdussabur have had applications approved to receive matching money and received their first checks. (A fourth candidate, Tom Goldenberg, is bypassing the program in order to be allowed to collect $1,000 individual checks.)
Brennan also filed paperwork with the Democracy Fund showing he had received well more than enough local contributions to qualify for matching dollars, around $31,000 from 364 New Haveners. But the filing included in the total of contributions received credit-card processing fees that some contributors “opted in” to pay rather than have the campaign foot the cost of the transaction.
No candidate had ever done that before in the NHDF’s 15 years, according to NHDF Administrator Aly Heimer.
“It’s really not about the $383. It’s about setting a precedent that has never been asked to apply before,” Heimer said.
So NHDF has put Brennan’s request for matching money on hold until it receives a legal opinion about how to proceed from the State Elections Enforcement Commission (SEEC). Heimer wrote to the SEEC asking how the agency counts donors’ payments of processing fees, whether they should be eligible for public-funding matches, and if NHDF needs to change its ordinance or candidate contracts “to avoid this confusion in the future.”
Until NHDF hears back from the SEEC, “the board cannot make a determination on what matching funds the Brennan campaign is eligible for,” Heimer stated.
Further, however the SEEC rules on this matter will likely mean more than one campaign will have to amend their SEEC filings and change their calculations going forward to account for these fees correctly on the Form 20 financial disclosure.
Brennan’s field director, Abdul Osmanu, said the campaign included the processing payments as contributions on principle: “I believe that would be improper because we would be playing with the gross amount donated.”
“I’m not concerned about this at all,” Brennan himself told the Independent. “We’re not going to live or die by these fees. We’re going to get this figured out in plenty of time for matching funds when it’s needed. We have more than enough money to do what we need to do right now.”
There’s still more to the issue. (And another acronym.)
The NHDF and SEEC do have different interpretations about whether those processing payments count as non-monetary “in-kind contributions.”
The SEEC says they do. So they tell state-office candidates participating in the Citizens Election Program (CEP) state public-financing program not to offer contributors the chance to “opt in” to pay those fees. Because the state program doesn’t allow “in-kind contributions.”
The NHDF, by contrast, which deals only with municipal mayoral elections, does not necessarily consider such processing fee payments as “in kind.” The donors pay the fees before any money actually gets advanced to the campaign.
So that’s part of what NHDF wants SEEC to help it figure out.
Even that might not be so simple.
The SEEC will reply soon with a legal opinion, agency spokesperson Joshua Foley said Tuesday.
In general, he said, New Haven’s Democracy Fund falls under the city’s jurisdiction, not the state’s. It is not governed by the state legislation governing the state CEP (Chapter 157 of the Connecticut General Statutes).
Rules for financing municipal campaigns do fall under Chapter 155 of the state general statutes. But that was written before the creation of public-financing programs, let alone online contributions and processing fees.
So it’s all about interpretation. “The rules of the CEP do not necessarily apply to” New Haven’s Democracy Fund, Foley said.
Abdussabur, Goldenberg Talk Education
Nora Grace-Flood Photo
ECA students protesting staff cuts on April 24.
Meanwhile, fellow Democratic candidate Shafiq Abdussabur was talking about the public schools Tuesday. He issued an education platform he said would help the city tackle state-bottom chronic absence rates and test scores.
“Public schools are the backbone of our democracy,” Abdussabur is quoted as saying in the release. “The Mayor needs to tell the story of the importance of our schools, articulate a clear vision for their future, line up support on the Board of Education and citywide in support of this positive vision – and end the bickering that undermines students, teachers, and staff.”
Abdussabur’s proposals include:
• Offering signing bonuses and free training to attract more school resources officers (SROs, aka school-based cops) and mediators to help make schools safer.
• Conducting an “independent audit of [New Haven Public Schools] operational practices, finances, and staff rosters” and ending “patronage hiring.”
• Expanding homebuyer and subsidized-rent programs to include teachers (as well as cops and firefighters); and using “micro-housing” (aka “tiny houses”) to help attract “new talent” here, an idea borrowed from Arizona.
• Promoting “financial literacy and civic engagement” and “concrete pathways to employment,” including teaching students how to “read a budget, develop an agenda, and collaborate with a team.”
Democratic candidate Goldenberg issued a release Monday calling for the state to eliminate a 2018 decision that dropped funding for magnet school students to attend Educational Center for the Arts (ECA), a regional alternative part-time afternoon program on Audubon Street.
That decision has blown a hole in ECA’s budget, leading the school to announce that it’s getting rid of department heads this coming academic year. That sparked a student protest last week. (Read about that here.)
Goldenberg also called on ECA’s parent organization, ACES, to “seek alternative remedies” to the department head elimination to address the budget deficit.
“The state’s return on investment into ECA as a magnet school has been realized many times over, given the world-class artists that are trained through the program and their contributions to society, not to mention the hundreds of students, myself included, who have experienced ECA as a safe haven for individual and artistic exploration,” the release quotes Goldenberg as stating.
Goldenberg has a new campaign manager, Russ Martin, to replace Darryl Brackeen, who resigned to take a new job with JP Morgan Chase Bank. Martin, who lives in Beaver Hills, makes films and serves as a project manager “for corporate and media entities,” according to a release.
Two other mayoral candidates, Wendy Hamilton and Macey Torres, have filed papers to run as independent candidates in the Nov. 7 general election.