Lame-duck council wins campaign fight, but here’s how to really drain the swamp | Opinion

Sometimes, futile gestures are the best gestures.

And that’s where we are today on campaign finance in the city of Wichita.

At Tuesday’s meeting, the City Council voted by a bare 4-3 majority to restore rules banning corporate and limited liability company contributions in city elections.

It’s probably not the most important change we could be making in the protection of our local democracy — more about that in a minute.

Frankly, I doubt the change in campaign finance rules will survive to the next election. It might not even survive until next week, when newly elected council members will take their seats.

Banning corporate and LLC contributions is a terrible change if you’re one of those people who have lots and lots of excess money and a need for favorable treatment from Wichita City Hall to make more. If you don’t and you don’t, which covers the vast majority of Wichitans, it’s a pretty good change.

But incoming Mayor Lily Wu has already stated her opposition to the rule that passed Tuesday. It isn’t hard to see why.

Her individual campaign raised a record-shattering $440,000 — including $115,000 from business contributions. Wu also got the benefit of another $192,000 spent by Americans for Prosperity, a political front group aligned with Koch Industries and its billionaire chairman and CEO Charles Koch.

Tuesday’s change is an effort to prevent a few wealthy Wichitans from skewing elections by giving far in excess of what’s supposed to be a $500 limit on campaign contributions to candidates for city offices.

Until a 2015 change in city ordinance, corporate interests and LLCs were prohibited from donating. At the time, supporters of allowing corporate contributions promised it would have little effect on our elections. Less than 10 years later, we have a $630,000 mayor.

The three council members who voted no on Tuesday — Frye, Becky Tuttle and Jeff Blubaugh — all made some version of the argument that sometimes the lesser-funded candidate has beaten a better-funded candidate.

That’s true, but it’s also beside the point.

The problem with allowing business contributions is that some of these guys (and they’re almost all guys) own dozens of tiny LLCs that they can launder virtually unlimited contributions through. It’s not uncommon for local developers and property owners to form LLCs to cover individual buildings, sometimes even the individual floors within buildings.

And when these business owners donate, what they are really buying is access to the politicians, which goes on long after the last votes are counted in any given election. They aren’t necessarily guaranteed that a council member will vote their way, but a hefty bundle of contributions in excess of the purported $500 limit does guarantee that they’ll get the time and attention to make their case for what they want.

The most fatuous argument at Tuesday’s meeting was that corporate and LLC contributions somehow make the system more transparent.

“You can go to the secretary of state’s website and you can see who owns that business and you can at least have some trackability to that money,” Blubaugh argued. “The way it was before, businesses had employees or their kids’ preschool teacher or day-care provider or something else writing checks and I believe it’s a lot more transparent today.”

There are two things wrong with that line of argument.

For one, paying off people to campaign-contribute for you is blatantly illegal. Most businesses are reluctant to do it since 2003, when city contractor Cornejo & Sons got fined $15,000 by the state for reimbursing company employees in cash for writing checks to their bosses’ favorite candidates

Two, it’s excruciatingly time-consuming to use the secretary of state’s website. A lot of these LLCs are owned or partly owned by other LLCs, so you often have to go through three or four layers of business filings to find the real cast of characters.

Eagle reporter Amy Renee Leiker made a database showing who donated and who owns the companies that donated in the last election. It took her nearly a full work week. And that was for only two candidates.

So here’s my humble suggestion for how to make our elections cleaner:

Ditch the $500 limit. It’s meaningless. Let business people contribute whatever they want. They do anyway, so why are we asked to pretend otherwise?

But make a hard and toothy rule that anyone owning more than 5% of a political-contributing company has to put their human name on the money line.

That would at least give the public a chance to know who among their elected officials is beholden to whom in the business community.

That’s how you bring transparency to the system.

It’s also why I’m not holding my breath that it’s ever going to happen.