CITY LIMITS INVESTIGATES:
The Price Of Politics

After a series of scandals roiled municipal government in the 1980s, New York City made a bold move to reduce the role of money in city politics. The City Council in February 1988 passed a Campaign Finance Act that limited the size of contributions that individual donors could make, prohibited donations from corporations and offered an incentive to campaigns: Agree to limit your overall spending, and the city will match a portion of the private contributions you collect with taxpayer money. The idea was to use public financing to level the playing field among candidates and donors, make money less of a factor in who won or lost, and restore citizens' faith in their government. Twenty years later, most would agree that the Act has made an impact – but not a transformational one, as the continuing power of incumbents and primacy of fundraising demonstrate.

As reported in the new edition of City Limits Investigates, Getting Change, the campaign finance system is credited with helping New York avoid major municipal scandals. In concert with term limits – approved by a popular vote in 1993 – which served to open up City Council seats and other offices, matching funds have allowed hundreds of candidates to wage credible campaigns that would have been unlikely if they had to rely on private money. The Voters Guide, televised debates, news stories about which contributor is giving how much to which candidate – these reflect the important role the Campaign Finance Board, which administers the 1988 law, has taken on to inform the public and shine light on the way candidates finance their runs for office. Admirers consider New York City's system the most rigorous in the country. Hank Sheinkopf, a longtime political consultant, says the city's campaign finance law has "strengthened democracy." Veteran good-government advocate Gene Russianoff, a lawyer with the New York Public Interest Research Group, calls it "a politician liberation act" because it has given candidates a measure of independence from wealthy donors.

But now the system faces new challenges. Starting with the 2009 race – which includes mayor, the entire City Council, all five borough presidents, comptroller and public advocate – the Campaign Finance Board's monitoring duties have been expanded to include enforcing a ban on donations from partnerships, LLCs and LLPs, as well as restricting donations from lobbyists, vendors and others who do business with the city. But the "doing business" law, like term limits, is up in the air – the subject of a federal suit led by a conservative legal activist who argues that the law violates civil rights by depriving candidates from racial and ethnic minorities of an important stream of donations. Meanwhile, the CFB is under a new requirement to complete its post-election audits of campaigns' finances within tight time limits – a rule that grew out of mounting frustration with the CFB's enforcement system, which some critics say is harsh, arbitrary and agonizingly slow. The CFB's defenders counter that the board's duty to prevent misuse of matching money is paramount. "Let me tell you," says Carole Campolo, who was deputy director of the CFB from its founding until she retired last year, "that is your tax money, and the staff and board take that very seriously."