Campaigns clash over contribution limits in Wichita. So what? | Opinion
There’s a reason they call election time “the silly season.”
But it doesn’t get much sillier than what’s going on with campaign finance in the Wichita City Council 1st District race.
Supporters of candidate LaWanda DeShazer are alleging that her opponent, Joseph Shepard, has violated a city ordinance capping contributions at $500. But the companion question is whether the ordinance itself violates state law, which would mean Shepard did nothing wrong, which is what his supporters are saying.
Both those things could be, and probably are, true.
And none of it matters in the real world, for reasons I’ll get to in a moment.
The city code’s contribution limit is, as stated, $500. But earlier this year, the Kansas Legislature passed a law raising the limit to $2,000 for local races in cities over 50,000 population, of which Wichita is one.
So, does a candidate follow the city code, or the state law? Which takes precedence? Where does the true limit lie?
City Attorney Jennifer Magana insists that the city’s limit is the ruling law. But her case is weak.
“An ordinance is presumptively valid,” she told Eagle reporter Chance Swaim. “So it’s the city’s position this ordinance is in effect.”
But all that’s really saying is that the city plans to keep doing what it’s doing — right or wrong.
“There is a framework for home rule in Kansas,” Magana said. “There is a series of questions and processes, and I can’t really speculate on how this would play out until and unless there was a challenge in court.”
That’s inadequate.
It’s the job of a city attorney to analyze City Council actions and make judgments on what is and isn’t a valid exercise of municipal authority — and advise the members accordingly, even if that means sometimes telling them they’re wrong.
It’s not the job of a city attorney to sit back and tell the electeds whatever they want to do is OK, until somebody takes the city to court.
That’s especially true when it comes to election integrity.
Shepard has decided to comply with the city ordinance and return $620, rather than become the test case for money in politics. It’s the right call politically, but it doesn’t solve the underlying problem of the confusing mismatch between state and local law.
The city can pretty easily solve this problem if it wants to. There’s a provision in the Kansas Constitution called “home rule” that allows municipalities to opt out of state laws under certain conditions.
But to do so, the council must pass what’s called a “charter ordinance.” It requires a two-thirds majority on the council, and there is a process for voters to challenge it if they want.
The current campaign finance limits were established in a regular city ordinance, which requires only a simple majority of the council to agree.
So the city could (and should) either make its ordinance consistent with state law and its higher contribution limits, or pass a charter ordinance to keep the lower city limits in place.
Either action would at least keep the paperwork in order, which when it comes right down to it, is the point of the exercise.
Remember earlier when I said this doesn’t really matter?
No practical limit to campaign contributions
There’s an old saying that’s been attributed to everybody from nameless computer geeks to baseball Hall of Famer Yogi Berra: “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.”
In theory, there’s a limit on what any one person can contribute to Wichita City Council candidates. In practice there isn’t.
That’s because under city code, corporations and limited liability companies can also donate to political campaigns.
So, the kind of person who’d give more that $500 (or $2,000 if we’re using the state limit) can donate whatever they want by stacking contributions from as many LLCs as they own or care to create.
And the big-money donors (developers wanting city handouts, mostly) generally have a constellation of LLCs to choose from. For business reasons, they create separate LLCs for each project, each building, sometimes even floors within a building.
For voters, about the only meaningful thing the city code does is require that corporate and LLC contributors report the name of the principal owner of the company or the person responsible for doling out the campaign cash. That was added to the law last year, and bravo for it.
The rest, including the $500 (or $2,000) limit on individual contributions, is window dressing — an illusion of integrity for the masses, easily circumvented by candidates and contributors who know how to work the system.
It would be a better world if our campaigns could focus on policy differences between candidates and how those might affect the way we live.
But, as Yogi Berra is also said to have said, “If the world were perfect, it wouldn’t be.”
