Mayor Derides ‘Pay-to-Play’ Campaign Financing

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The New York Sun

Mayor Bloomberg took another swipe at the City Council yesterday over its efforts to change the city’s system of public financing of campaigns, saying donations from people who do business with the city should be banned, not matched with public dollars.


In a speech, Mr. Bloomberg also outlined several other election-related changes he’d like to see. The most notable included reducing the number of signatures a candidate must collect to get on the ballot, revamping the Board of Elections, and giving the mayor power to appoint judges to the state Supreme Court and Civil Court. He called the process of election of judges “a sham” and “a disgrace,” and he termed the courts, which have had several corruption scandals recently, and the elections board the “last bastions of political patronage.”


On the subject of petitioning for inclusion on the ballot, the mayor said: “It’s become a whole cottage industry of you don’t have to beat the other guy based on positions or your ability to serve, all you gotta do is beat him because you got a better lawyer who can get him thrown off the ballot. I think it’s time to end this ‘gotcha’ kind of technique where lawyers comb petitions to find some technical violation.”


Mr. Bloomberg, who reported spending roughly $74 million from his personal fortune to get elected in 2001, said he would sign a campaign finance bill only if it prohibits or “severely restricts” donations from those who do business with the city.


“In the parlance of business, it’s called pay-to-play, and while it may not fit your legal definition of bribery or extortion, the rest of us, the public, understand exactly what it is,” Mr. Bloomberg said during a speech on election reform at the Penn Club in Midtown.


The mayor also used the speech to dust off a referendum item supported by voters in 1998, calling on the Campaign Finance Board to consider restricting those kinds of contributions. A board spokeswoman, Molly Watkins, said yesterday that such restrictions would be nearly impossible to enforce and that the opinion of the board is that if anything along those lines is to be done, it should be done through legislation.


A hearing is expected to be held in the council next month on a bill to forbid campaign contributions from those doing business with the city, but the measure has few supporters and will probably be dead on arrival.


While the mayor’s opposition to the council’s recently passed bill on campaign financing has been on the record for some time, his remarks yesterday inflame a continuing clash with the council speaker, Gifford Miller, who plans to challenge him in next year’s election.


For his part, Mr. Miller, a Democrat from the Upper East Side, has said the mayor’s extravagant out-of-pocket campaign spending gives him an undue advantage against any opponent. Mr. Miller, the top fund-raiser so far among the politicians who are considered likely to seek the Democratic nomination to oppose Mr. Bloomberg next year, reported in July that he has raised $3.3 million for the campaign.


The mayor says the bill, which increases the cap on city matching funds to eight-to-one for some campaign donations, was crafted only with him and the upcoming election in mind. He has said his spending, which is expected to hit $100 million for the 2005 election, does not give him an unfair advantage. He also points out that he does not spend taxpayers’ money on his campaigns.


That, of course, does not fly with the Democrat-dominated council, which will probably override a mayoral veto effortlessly.


“This has rightly been known as the best municipal campaign-finance system in the country,” Mr. Miller’s chief spokesman, Steven Sigmund, said. “It gives an unprecedented public match in order to level the playing field and make sure everybody is competing the same way. This is a guy who’s come in and destroyed that system.”


In his speech, which was delivered at a breakfast sponsored by the Fund for Modern Courts, Mr. Bloomberg also said he would establish a task force, similar to one created by Mayor Giuliani in 2001, to address problems with the board. Many of the problem areas, however, involve matters controlled by Albany.


Last week’s presidential election brought new attention to the city’s dated voting machines and the board’s inept phone and Web infrastructure, which virtually collapsed from the volume of queries. On Monday, the New York Times reported that the city has had $27 million available to upgrade voting machines but has yet to act.


Federal law requires the city to make the upgrades, and Washington will provide $200 million to do it. But first the state needs to submit a plan that qualifies. New machines are not realistic for the 2005 election and will probably not be phased in for the statewide elections in 2006 either.


The New York Sun

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