That was the question raised in an email yesterday from Kioni Dudley, who has been tirelessly working in opposition to the development of the Hoopili project.
He wrote:
A few days ago, I sent you this information we have found about the City Council Members taking huge campaign donations from entities that would profit directly from their vote approving Ho’opili. Unfortunately, everything they did was legal. However, I noted that Forward Progress PAC spent $105,000 to get Brandon Elefante elected, and PRP PAC spent $86,000 to get Carol Fukunaga elected. This support created a conflict of interest for both which they should have declared before voting on Bill 3. I believe we can get their votes invalidated.
It’s an interesting theory.
The City Charter specifically recognizes that legal campaign contributions do not create a conflict of interest. If I read it correctly, these campaign contributions are legal and, by definition, don’t represent a conflict.
Section 11-102. Conflicts of Interest —
1. No elected or appointed officer or employee shall:
(a) Solicit or accept any gift, directly or indirectly, whether in the form of money, loan, gratuity, favor, service, thing or promise, or in any other form, under circumstances in which it can reasonably be inferred that the gift is intended to influence the officer or employee in the performance of such person’s official duties. Nothing herein shall preclude the solicitation or acceptance of lawful contributions for election campaigns.
What Dudley then suggests is that spending in support of a candidate by Super Pacs, such as the PRP Pac, are not campaign contributions and, therefore, may be subject to public disclosure as potential conflicts.
I would have to strongly disagree with this assessment.
By definition, campaign expenditures by Super Pacs in support of candidates or in opposition, must be independent of the candidates who benefit. If there’s coordination with the campaigns, then the expenditures have to be considered contributions and will be subject to the standard contribution limits.
So although council members may have benefited from independent spending by Super Pacs, they could not solicit, accept, or control it. And as a result, these expenditures are not covered by the conflict of interest provisions.
I don’t see that there was a duty on the part of the council members to disclose the spending because they would have no direct knowledge of it. And there’s nothing in the applicable ordinances or charter provisions that would require a council member to disclose independent actions by others.
So my answer would be that this is a dead end, unless there’s some kind of evidence of coordination between the pacs and the campaigns. And, in that case, it would create issues under the campaign spending laws and not under the city’s ethics provisions. At least that’s how I would view the situation.
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It’s not terribly comforting to learn that this sort of conduct, though certainly creating the appearance and likely the reality of a conflict of interest, is perfectly legal.
This “sort of conduct” is called politics. It is a basic right of all people in our democracy that they can band together to support the election of candidates that will represent their interests.
It would be shocking if candidates supported by development interests aggressively opposed development which is consistent with City plans and in conformance with City rules, regulations, and standards. None of the City Council members ran on an anti-development platform.
Confusing political behavior in which officials vote in ways that their supporters favor with corrupt behavior (i.e. vote buying) is unfair and slanderous.
This is just one of a number of dead ends Kioni Dudley has attempted to lead us into.
I have very little faith in the electorate. I have resigned myself to accepting that the people of Oahu are not capable of stopping bad public policy when it comes to development. The only hope is an occasional victory in the courts.
Campaign contributions can certainly influence elections and buy influence, but Dudley’s conflict of interest argument is simply absurd on its face, and even he probably understands that.
But, in a perfect example of your recent “How lunacy becomes reality” observation, media simply parrot Dudley’s wild claims anyway without a whiff of critical thinking or a stab at the type of analysis you have presented here — or even a superficial opposing point of view to complete the “he said, she said” loop that’s usually employed to enhance the illusion of actual reporting. Not even a simple explanatory sentence to draw a clear distinction between undisclosed gifts and duly reported campaign contributions:
“Meanwhile, the nonprofit Friends of Makakilo filed a complaint with the Ethics Commission seeking to throw out the unanimous rezoning approval the City Council gave to D.R. Horton-Schuler Homes’ contentious Ho’opili project in May.
Kioni Dudley, the group’s president and founder, said Tuesday that the votes should be invalidated because each of the nine Council members had received large amounts of campaign contributions from Schuler, the chamber, contractors, labor interests and other parties that would benefit from the project.
Since the Ethics Commission’s executive director and one commission member have said votes by Council members who received gifts from people benefiting from the rail project should be invalidated, so too should the votes of all the Council members who voted on Ho’opili, Dudley said.
Each of the nine received significant campaign contributions from those interested parties, and six of the nine Council members got a majority of all their contributions the last two years from those parties, Dudley said. None of the Council members disclosed in detail the extent of the interests before voting, he said, and the votes of all nine were tainted, he told reporters at a Honolulu Hale press conference Tuesday.
An analysis of Campaign Spending Commission reports by the Honolulu Star-Advertiser in May showed that during the last election cycle, eight of the nine councilmembers received contributions from Horton-Schuler executives. …”
http://www.staradvertiser.com/news/breaking/20150908_Opponents_challenge_City_Council_votes_on_rail_Hoopili_projects.html?id=325807161
Sounds like buying a city council vote to me.