Editor’s note: This commentary is by Rich Nadworny, an entrepreneur, writer and VPR commentator. In the spring of 2014 he worked with other volunteers to pass the Burlington School Board revote. He lives in the New North End of Burlington with his wife and two school-aged children.
[L]ast spring I was involved in my first political campaign from the get-go: to pass the Burlington school budget revote. I don’t plan on making it a habit.
Our YES crew was a bunch of volunteers, mostly parents doing a lot of outreach and DIY campaign material. We crafted most of our lawn signs by hand, for example. And we won, by only 67 votes, but still, we won.
In spite of our grassroots nature, the campaign still cost money. It cost several thousand dollars, according to the campaign finance filings. The NO side, on the other hand, was driven by one person with some campaign materials with high-production value, including lawn signs and door hangers. When the campaign was over, I was curious to see how much those materials cost, since us YESes were unable to afford them.
In July, I visited the Vermont Secretary of State’s website to view the campaign finance filings. Specifically, I looked for filings by the PAC responsible for the NO campaign, “Burlingtonians for Better Education and Sustainability” that was organized and managed by Burlington School Board representative Scot Shumski.
The NO campaign had not filed a campaign finance report. This seemed odd to me. Shumski’s campaign ran under the slogan “Accountability Now.” You would think that someone making accountability such a critical issue would hold himself and his PAC to even higher standards of accountability, including filing campaign finance reports.
Based on conversations with seasoned political organizers, it was reasonable to assume that the NO campaign had raised and spent at least $1,000, the reporting threshold for PACs. I contacted the Elections Division at the Secretary of State’s Office. They told me that they were responsible for campaign finance reporting and that the Attorney General’s Office was responsible for campaign finance enforcement. They suggested I visit the AG’s website to file a complaint.
So, I visited the site. It wasn’t entirely clear where to file a complaint. At that time there was no visible link to the Campaign Finance Division, so I sent a general email to ask where I should file a complaint. A representative from the AG’s office suggested I file a consumer complaint and that they would make sure it ended up in the right hands. This seemed odd, but I did as they asked and filled out the Web form asking them to look into potential campaign finance violations for “Burlingtonians for Better Education and Sustainability.”
A month passed and I had not received any response. I emailed them to check on the investigation. They informed me that there was no record of my complaint! Luckily, the website had sent me a copy of the form I had filled out, and I forwarded that to the AG’s office.
About two weeks later, I received an email directly from Scot Shumski. He informed me that the AG’s office recommended he reach out to me to solve this “dispute” and assured me he had not spent or raised more than $1,000.
I wasn’t sure why he reached out to me directly until the next day when I received this by snail mail:
Dear Rich Nadworny:
Thank you for contacting us with your complaint. We have sent a copy to the business asking it to contact you within 7 days to resolve this problem. We have also asked the business to notify us of the action it takes. Your complaint and the business response will become part of our public record for six years. It is our experience that two of every three complaints are successfully resolved through this procedure.
In 14 days, please update us on the complaint status by using the Online Response Form on our website, uvm.edu/consumer, or submit a written response. Please note, upon receipt of your update we may do one of the following:
1. If you indicate that your complaint was resolved, we will close the file accordingly.
2. If you indicate that the business has not contacted you, we will contact the business again on your behalf.
3. If you indicate that the business contacted you but your complaint remains unresolved, the action we take will depend in great part on the business response. If the response is unsatisfactory, we may pursue this matter further. If your complaint is not appropriate for further action on our part, we may refer you to small claims court or suggest that you consult a private attorney.
Thank you for bringing your complaint to our attention.
Yikes. First, they were treating this as a typical business complaint. It was as if I had purchased a clunker of a car from used-car salesman Shumski and wanted my money back. Bizarre.
It was as if I had reported a suspected DUI driver and the cops had told me to follow the driver and give him a Breathalyzer test with a leftover birthday balloon.
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Second, the thought that this would be solved by receiving assurance by the accused party that everything was OK was even more bizarre. What was it that Ronald Reagan kept saying? Trust, but verify. If there was one thing we Burlington voters learned about Scot Shumski, it’s that he’s not the most honest or transparent politician around. He uses a lot of deceptive language to mask his intentions and actions. Personally, I’ve watched, at a forum he called together, as he refused to give an honest answer to a direct question by one of his constituents.
I reached back out to the Attorney General’s Office. They told me I should ask for receipts, if that’s what I needed. Basically, they were turning over the investigation to me, a private citizen with no authority. It was as if I had reported a suspected DUI driver and the cops had told me to follow the driver and give him a Breathalyzer test with a leftover birthday balloon.
So I did. I emailed Scot Shumski and asked for the receipts for the lawn signs and the hangtags. Scot responded promptly and courteously with the two receipts. The grand total for those two items was $990. $10 less than the reporting cut-off.
Now, I’m not a professional campaign finance investigator. But it strikes me as probable that any campaign is going to have some residual costs of $10 or more. I was also under the impression that if any individual donates $100 or more to a campaign that the said campaign needs to report that.
What was even more disturbing was the sinking feeling that the Accountability Now campaign had every intention of doing what it could to NOT be accountable.
I forwarded the receipts to the Attorney General’s office pointing this out, and asked them to look into this further. After a few weeks, I received another snail mail that looked like this:
Dear Mr. Nadworny:
We have reviewed your complaint of July 24, 2014, in which you made allegations against the Burlingtonians for Better Education and Sustainability for potential violations of Vermont’s campaign finance laws. After examining the complaint and the legal issues, the Attorney General’s Office has determined the Burlingtonians for Better Education and Sustainability did not violate the current campaign finance laws.
The current Campaign Finance Laws only require a PAC to register and file if they make expenditures of $1,000.00 or more or accept contributions of $1,000.00 or more. It has been determined that Burlingtonians for Better Education and Sustainability has made expenditures in the amount of $990.00. Therefore, we have determined that Burlingtonians for Better Education and Sustainability was not required to file a campaign finance report for the local election period.
Please feel free to contact me should you have any further questions.
Thank you.
Hmm. It didn’t seem like there was any further investigation beyond looking at my emails and some emails between the AG and Scot Shumski. Apparently the “I’ll take your word for it” defense works!
Here’s what I’m concluding from this experience:
• The Attorney General’s Office doesn’t have the resources and will to spend time on most campaign finance investigations.
• Most probably, that is due to the fact that the legislators in Montpelier have no desire to add teeth to campaign finance enforcement, enforcement that might come back to bite them on the rear end.
• It’s pretty easy to file a campaign finance report to ensure that everyone is accountable. The only reason for not doing it is probably the assumption that people are either too lazy, stupid or dishonest to do so. I wonder if that’s the picture legislators have of themselves?
• If a politician really doesn’t want to be accountable to Vermont citizens, there’s not a lot holding them back, from a campaign finance standpoint.
Now, having been anointed as Citizen Investigator by the Attorney General’s office once, I’m looking forward to having them deputize me to pursue Environmental Protection violations. Bill Sorrell, I’m ready when you are!