By Brandon Marlowe Guest Commentary
The City Council is exploring options for local campaign finance reform. First and foremost, they should craft a plan that serves residents by protecting local politics from special interests and their expensive attack campaigns.
We wonder why our town keeps getting more congested, and why developments we residents oppose keep springing up anyway, including massive condos that replace affordable housing and displace our neighbors.
In local politics, money talks — and big money from out-of-town developers has been shouting the loudest. Last year, one Beverly Hills-based hotel developer spent close to $1 million trying to buy the election. They ran a nasty attack campaign, with TV spots and relentless direct mail, against a pro-resident, pro-environment incumbent... all the while, trying to elect candidates more willing to approve their plans for runaway beachfront development.
We Santa Monicans are smart. We didn’t buy the attack campaign, and the deep-pocketed hotel owners were unmasked and defeated — this time. Unfortunately, spending that kind of money is merely a cost of doing business for developers who stand to make millions by turning our town into Beverly Hills-by-the-sea. They will be back in future elections, fat checkbooks in hand — we can count on it.
In 2006, the dollar amount of independent expenditures — which, because of established court decisions, cannot be limited — increased by an alarming 300 percent over the previous Council race. The bulk of it happened to come from developers, but really, any well-heeled group can get a very large foot in the door and a very large thumb on the scale of political power. And you can be sure that most of them won’t have the average Santa Monican’s quality of life at the top of their agenda.
It’s human nature to want to avoid being attacked, so our local elected officials tend to become more timid about standing up to developers. If we residents want to regain control of our town, we have to stop the bullies. This brings us back to local campaign finance reform.
What is it about the current system that gives the big advantage to well-heeled outsiders? Special interest groups and their consultants create some plausible-sounding shadow entity — “Santa Monicans for Apple Pie” — and then flood voters with fliers and other communications that seem to come from a committee of concerned citizens.
Courts have said corporations have the right to do this, even if the content is lies meant to buy elections: It’s protected as free speech. That free speech too often comes at the high cost of harm to our quality of life. In this last election, it was developers taking aim at us with their money; next time other special interests may join the party. If we can’t prohibit wealthy outside interests from spending big bucks in Santa Monica politics to overwhelm local voices, what can we do? We can fight back.
Last year, the developers outspent the candidate they attacked 20-to-1. That’s not a typo: They spent about $800,000. He spent less than $40,000, but he had an honest, credible message.
What if we ensured that future candidates could answer such attacks, by making available from a public fund the modest sum needed — in Santa Monica that’s about $40,000 or $50,000 — to effectively get their message out if they are attacked?
Full public financing of campaigns has been suggested, but the costs might be high. It may not make sense to put public dollars behind each and every candidate who comes forward, and it’s hard to know where and how to set the bar for who should qualify.
What if, instead, we simply made about $40-$50K in public funding available to any candidate who is attacked? The special interests would think twice about mounting an attack, because the candidate they oppose would get to fight back. It would help candidates find their backbone and resist the temptation to cave in to developers to avoid becoming a target.
No solution is perfect. But we must begin to protect ourselves — now. Think about what overdevelopment costs you and your neighborhood. Think about the friends forced out of town, and the traffic congestion and lower quality of life for those of us who remain. Stopping the political attack campaigns would be a great investment in keeping Santa Monica’s future in residents’ hands.
BRANDON MARLOWE is a member of VOTE4SM, a group working to achieve political finance reform in Santa Monica.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on October 23, 2007. Read the original PDF.