In NY the Working Families Party owned the Data & Field Services which provided polling, phone banks, petition gathering services for endorsed candidates of the party. The claim was the candidate had to use DFS for the endorsement and payed less for the services to bypass Campaign Finance Board cost rules. The case used the campaign for Debi Rose, who ran for a City Council seat.
According to the terms of the settlement, Data & Field Services must formally separate from the Working Families Party and Working Families Organization. This includes implementing management and employment structures entirely separately from the Working Families, as well as retaining a public accounting firm and law firm that have no ties to the Working Families. All of this must be overseen by a newly appointed Board of Directors. That Board, according to the settlement, must have a majority of members who have neither been employed by nor contributed to the WFP nor even employed by or contributed to anyone who is a contributor to the WFP for at least two years. This would keep Data & Field Services from being run by current Working Families employees and contributors, as well as by employees of many of the city’s major unions.
The settlement also requires Rose’s campaign to pay $13,000 in additional fees. These will put the campaign over the city spending limit, opening it up to potential fines from the Campaign Finance Board. In addition, the campaign must make a good faith review of its books, which is estimated could mean between $40,000 and $60,000 additional charges.
If the high end of the estimate is correct, the undercharges could constitute nearly half of the $161,000 spending limit for Council campaigns.
After court adjourned in Staten Island on Tuesday, Working Families executive director Dan Cantor dismissed the settlement of the case against Data & Field Services and the Debi Rose campaign as “a very noisy lawsuit that has ended very quietly.”
But to several outside observers, Cantor’s presence at the court to handle the questions from reporters, fact sheets in hand, underscored an outcome that they say is a major change of practices for the Working Families family.
But despite the court-ordered massive overhaul of operations, Cantor rejected the idea that there were any problems with how DFS or the WFP acted through last year’s elections.
“There was nothing wrong and there will be nothing wrong now either,” Cantor said. “There will be some reforms that are good things. We want to increase the ability of both organizations to thrive, we want to increase public confidence in both, and we’re optimistic that this will do that.”
The United States Attorney’s investigation, which began in December with subpoenas to the Working Families and all its 2009 primary campaigns, is also underway. Cantor declined comment on that investigation.
Michael H. Drucker
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1 comment:
It sounds like you're creating problems yourself by trying to solve this issue instead of looking at why their is a problem in the first place.
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