During a local city election, community members show support for their candidates in the form of a campaign contribution to their respective election that according to the city’s ordinance cannot surpass an amount of $249.

In recent months, this issue became a topic of debate among current members of the City Council, which is now under review by the municipality and could be up for revision in the near future.

At its May 11 meeting, the council voted to direct City Attorney Mike Jenkins to generate several proposals in the potential revision of the ordinance as a way to fine-tune parts of the code related to contributions to independent committees based on donations recorded from the city’s most recent City Council election last November.

According to the code which was adopted in 1987, “No person shall make, nor shall any candidate for elective office or his or her committee, accept any contribution, gift, subscription, loan, advance, pledge or promise of money in aid of the nomination or election of a candidate which will cause the total given by such a person with respect to a single election in support of, or opposite such candidate, to exceed the sum of $249. This section shall not apply to amounts given by a candidate to his own campaign.”

The question raised related to the code is how this section of the ordinance is applied and enforced among independent committees. According to Jenkins, independent committees were not involved in local elections prior to 1999 in regard to the election of candidates but were for the support or opposition of ballot measures and so the issue has never been raised until now.

“Based on a review of the city’s records by the city clerk, an independent committee was established to oppose a candidate (Sam Edgerton) for City Council for the first time in the 1999 municipal election, called the Committee for Accountability on Hermosa Beach City Council,” states Jenkins. “The committee appeared to have been formed just prior to the election and the committee reported several contributions in excess of $249 several months after the election in November 1999. Thereafter in connection with the 2003 municipal election, an organization called Citizens for a Better Hermosa Beach, which identified itself as a ‘county committee’ disclosed $6,500 in contributions from five individual donors. Finally, a committee called the Hermosa Beach Downtown Restaurant and Tavern Committee also formed in connection with the November 2003 election and reported 10 contributions all for $249. Because some contributors to these committees exceeded the $249 limit, the question has arisen as to the applicability … to these contributions.”

Citizens for a Better Hermosa Beach was established by campaign consultant and former council candidate Fred Huebscher who was the treasurer of the committee and contends to be its only member. Former mayor Roger Creighton contributed $1,000 to the committee while Huebscher took out a loan of $5,000 that he contributed to the committee.

In November, Huebscher claimed he partially funded and designed two of the three mailers, which circulated around town opposing Edgerton’s re-election. A series of three 8-inch by 11-inch glossy color mailers may have been sent out to between 3,000 to 9,000 households the weekend before the election.

“Committees may be either controlled or independent with reference to a specific candidate. A controlled committee is any that is directly or indirectly controlled by a candidate or that acts jointly with a candidate or controlled committee,” added Jenkins. “By contrast, any other committee only falls within the general state law definition of a committee, however, upon receiving $1,000 or more in political contributions, contributing $10,000 or more to any political campaign or making $1,000 or more in independent expenditures. Independent committees that do not do any of these things are not committees within the meanings of either the statute or the city’s regulation and are thus not subject to reporting requirements of state law or contribution caps imposed by the city.”

“Thus, under current state law and for the city’s purposes, an independent expenditure committee is any person or combination thereof that without being either directly or indirectly controlled by a candidate or acting in concert with a candidate, receives $1,000 or more in political contributions and expressly advocates the election or defeat of a candidate,” explained Jenkins. “Whether a given organization this active in city elections is governed by the ordinance thus depends upon the level of contributions it receives or makes and whether it engages in express advocacy for or against the candidate. Under this definition, both committees might or might not qualify as independent expenditure committees. Each received political contributions in excess of $1,000 but the city staff does not possess evidence as to how precisely they spent it or whether they engaged in express advocacy.”

Edgerton was the lone dissenter on the issue and voted against revising the city code, one that he feels shouldn’t undergo change but rather should just be enforced.

“I voted against it because I don’t want to see the ordinance changed. I don’t think it needs to be changed but rather enforced,” said Edgerton. “What’s more galling is this happened last election and nothing happened, and they did it all the last weekend of the election to see if they could take you out as a candidate.”

The City Council will look at Jenkins’ proposals for revising the city’s campaign finance ordinance in the near future.