Grass Roots Campaign

Fair is fair. 

Today we look at the contributions and expenditures of the supporters of the ballot measures. Yesterday I looked at the campaign of the opponents.

The group advocating for a change in the county charter, Jackson County for All, is an authentic, grass-roots movement.

Jackson County for All Website

Yesterday I wrote that the local good ol' boy network coalesced to oppose the charter change.  Being "good ol' boys" doesn't make them wrong. It makes them loyal to the team. Opponents of the measures have every right to use the tools at their disposal -- money -- to get endorsements and to fund a campaign. I realize it looks like a self-serving, crony situation, but that is the way of the world. It is the right of companies that have multimillion dollar contracts with the county to give to a cause important to the client. For the businesses, whether it is three commissioners or five commissioners, partisan or nonpartisan, paid $150,000 a year or paid less, is of little consequence. But it is important to the commissioners, and since they approve their contracts and franchise agreements, of course the businesses say yes if asked to contribute to their campaign in opposition.

It is the same with the county sheriff who wrote a statement saying that if the county finds office space for two extra people it might reduce the money going to the sheriff -- that in a $600 million budget. It is nonsense, but nonsense the commissioners want to hear. It makes sense for the sheriff's department to be a team player with the people who approve his departmental budget. I think the sheriff is short-sighted. Maybe with five commissioners rather than three, and with them doing a better job of getting out into the public, both listening and explaining the current jail dysfunction, they won't do what the commissioners did four years ago, when they offered up a tone-deaf 800-bed lockup facility for public vote. (The public rejected it 71% to 29%.)

The campaigns for and against the measures are very different. The supporters are a classic example of a citizen movement. The 200-plus people who gathered the petitions were all local citizen volunteers. There is no paid staff. It is reflected in the contributions and expenditures report.

The opponents' list of campaign contributions and expenditures that I presented yesterday was short and sweet. How different from Jackson County for All. Their Orestar report is cluttered with multiple donations, many of them small and aggregated. Then a large number of contributions in larger amounts -- $100-plus -- from retired people and people with no recognizable business connection to county government. There are dozens of little expenses for campaign supplies paid for and reimbursed to the campaign's manager, Denise Krause, and other volunteers. These are payments to Staples for campaign supplies, to local media for advertisements, to sign venders for those Yes! Yes! Yes! signs. Go to Orestar and enter Committee ID# 23119, and click on the Campaign Finance Transactions on the left:

This goes on for five more pages. A diligent reader will see that my name appears twice, making a total of $2,000 in contributions. I made the contributions happily and proudly. I was an early supporter of this charter change effort. My primary motivator was not the salaries, even though 44 years ago that was an element of my own campaign, when cost of living increases had pushed the salary from $28,000/year to a little over $30,000. I said commissioner salaries were becoming an issue for voters, and we ought to scale them back. Nor was it the move from three to five commissioners, although this is overdue. 

My primary motivation is the partisan issue. Local issues don't split on the partisan divides that roil the state and nation. Candidates should run nonpartisan races. I served with Hank Henry, a veteran journalist before he won election to the Board of Commissioners. He was a Republican. In two years, with perhaps 1000 votes on matters of significant controversy and substance, there was exactly one vote on which we disagreed. He and I saw eye-to-eye on local issues, although we would have disagreed on presidential and congressional politics. There is no need to bring the partisanship at the national and state level here to the local level.

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