On Wednesday, the city council is going to reconsider an item they’d earlier passed. At the mayor’s request—taking a tactic out of Randy Leonard’s playbook, when he moved to reconsider Sam Adams’ street fee—the council will take another look at something they passed last week:

Direct Auditor to treat July 15, 2008 special runoff election as General Election for purposes of Code Chapter 2.10 (Second Reading Agenda 284)

I can’t find the full PDF’s text of the bill, now an ordinance, but that basic title is clear to me: For the purposes of the public financing laws (chapter 2.10), should the city auditor treat the special election for Erik Sten’s seat, where Jim Middaugh is the only publicly financed candidate, like a regular election? In other words, should Middaugh make it to through the primary, would he get $200,000 like other publicly financed city council candidates. I wasn’t surprised it passed—the city council made it very clear in January that they didn’t want to monkey around with elections rules (or create new ones about public financing) during an election. And Middaugh already qualified for public financing under the “regular” rules, meeting the same deadline as candidates for regular races.

Well, at least two members of the council have changed their tune. The mayor sent this out to his colleagues, and Randy Leonard is in agreement with him, thinking a little over $66K is the magic number:

Dear City Council Members,

I have requested that the City Council reconsider ordinance 181658 as an agenda item on this week’s March 12 Council calendar. The Council passed this ordinance last week; it grants VOE candidates in a greatly compressed special election the same level of funding VOE candidates receive in a regular election. I believe the community’s support of VOE rests of its continued perception of the system’s fairness and fiscal responsibility. I am suggesting that we award a prorated amount to VOE candidates in special elections, somewhere between $50,000 and $60,000 rather than $200,000, depending on the date of the certification.

Tom

Tonight, the Citizen Campaign Commission—the body charged with overseeing and analyzing public financing—considered this turn of events in the first few minutes of their meeting. Ultimately, they realized the topic could suck up their entire meeting time, so they opted to have the chair draft a letter to the council for their approval via email tomorrow. The chair, Leslie Hildula, told the rest of the commission she wasn’t hearing anyone argue that $200,000 was inappropriate.

After the jump, see Auditor Gary Blackmer’s note to Randy Leonard, explaining why $200K may be appropriate, plus Leonard’s explanation to me of why he supports the reconsideration.

I had actually done some research into special election costs and I am attaching a spreadsheet that shows a special election you'll probably recall. I was trying to do some analysis about spending which is why it's broken down the way it is. What you'll see is that both you and Serena raised well over $200,000 in just 49 days, about the same runoff period we're talking about. Add inflation and the two of you averaged over $250,000 in today's dollars, not counting in-kind contributions.

Perhaps the Citizen Campaign Commission could have shaved $25,000 off the amount but I think we all became convinced that we shouldn't start rewriting the rules in the middle of an election. I am sure the Commission will revisit this topic when they craft a special election section of the public campaign finance chapter, but they may not opt to change it.

Many factors were considered when the amounts for campaigns were set but a principle one was how much it would cost to communicate to the voters about a candidate and his or her message. Thinking in terms of the compressed time is not the only dimension and may be secondary to the need to reach out to the same number of voters as a regular election. In addition, a special election may be even more difficult to get voter attention because it may occur completely outside the normal cycle.

I'm more than willing to talk about this some more, but we did not intend to disadvantage anyone and I honestly believe that the $200,000 number for the runoff is not unfair.

Gary

5 minutes later:

Let me clarify one point. While this spreadsheet talks about spending, the real important point is that it is quite possible to raise $250,000 in 49 days and a publicly-financed candidate still needs to be competitive with a privately-financed candidate.

Gary

I spoke with Leonard this afternoon, once I'd heard that he, too, supported reconsidering the ordinance. I'm going to dig up my notes from the meeting where the council considered how to handle public financing in this special election in the first place—Leonard was the most forceful about the council keeping their nose out of an open election. Why does he want to tweak the rules now?

"I don't think it was clear to at least a majority of the council when we voted on the changes last week that it actually included in it a decision to give, in the special election that's coming up, $200,000 to the runoff candidate who's VOE," Leonard says. That amount, he says, "makes it almost impossible for a non-VOE candidate to compete. The mayor and I both agreed that the whole point of VOE is to level the playing field."

Leonard says "an interested third party" brought the matter to his attention. I asked him if Middaugh's opponent, Nick Fish—the major "non-VOE candidate" in the race—was the one to mention it. Leonard has endorsed Fish, but he says Fish wasn't the one to bring it up.

Leonard says that the auditor is correct—he did raise $200,000 "or close to that" when he ran in a special election, but says he spent hours a day, seven days a week on the phone soliciting funds. That the auditor based his calculations, in part, on "the singular most expensive special election in the history of the city" doesn't make sense to Leonard. (I'll have to review my tape, but I believe the Auditor told the Citizen Campaign Commission tonight that $66K would put a publicly financed candidate on par with the lowest funded special election candidates in city history.)

Leonard wants the public financing for special elections to be calculated on a per-day basis—in this case, that's $66,666. "That more than meets the intent without creating this upside down system," Leonard says.

How does this jive with his speech on not changing the rules? "Last Wednesday Gary [Blackmer] was changing the rules. There were no rules of a special election," Leonard says. "I'm deeply disappointed that he didn't call this out last Wednesday [at the council meeting]. It feels a little bit like the discussion wasn't as transparent as it should have been. It should have been made clear what all of the significant issues were."

UPDATE @ 7:58 pm: I found my notes from the January meeting when the council was creating a special election in the first place. They also addressed public funding. What Leonard said then (according to my admittedly rough notes):

I just believe in fairness, and fair is fair. It is exceedingly unfair to change the rules for an election during the election. While this process is in play, to at all tinker with any of the rules and the processes associated with that election...

Bad public policy to do anything that even remotely looks like we are somehow participating in an election as a council, politically. For the sanctity of the election process... calls into question the fairness of the election...

If it wasn't done up until now, I say wait until the process is over.

...the worst thing we can do is interject ourselves into an election whether we think it's for noble purposes or not.