Board Proposes New Campaign Finance Rules

The Campaign Finance Board took another step yesterday toward changing the way the city finances the campaigns of candidates who face wealthy opponents. The board issued a roster of new regulations for public comment.The new rules are meant to codify new regulations the City Council put in force last week, when members overrode a mayoral veto of a measure that raises the cap on matching funds to $6 per dollar contributed. That is up from the previous 5-to-1 maximum.The new campaign-financing levels are likely to be in force in time to help the candidates seeking to challenge Mayor Bloomberg, who spent $74 million of his personal fortune on the 2001 election, next November.The Campaign Finance Board is the city’s election-finance watchdog. One of the rules it proposes would allow the board to refuse to publish in a voters’ guide any campaign materials it deems offensive.Council Speaker Gifford Miller, a Democrat who represents the Upper East Side and plans to run for mayor next year, applauded the finance board’s speedy release of the new regulations for public comment.“We will continue to work with the CFB to further strengthen the city elections,” Mr. Miller said in a written statement yesterday, adding that candidates who wield their millions were perverting the city’s election process.“Mike Bloomberg is single-handedly working to destroy the CFB’s model campaign finance system,” he said.Mr. Bloomberg has been pushing some campaign-finance changes of his own. He intends to set up a computer database to track campaign contributors who do business with the city, in a bid to limit their potential political influence. While voters approved that kind of change in 1998, until now no one has developed a system that would allow for precise tracking of contributors, contractors, and candidates in one place.The Bloomberg administration has been saying for months that it could help the finance board build such a database, and the mayor sent the chairman of the board, Frederick A. O. Schwarz Jr., a letter last week laying out how he proposed to crack down on contributors who “pay to play.”Mr. Bloomberg said to reporters he didn’t think the system would be in place in time for next year’s election but the process had started. Officials of the campaign board have met with representatives of the city’s Department of Information Technology and Law Department, city officials said.

Board Proposes New Campaign Finance Rules

Board Proposes New Campaign Finance Rules

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