Twitter

BlogAds

Recent Comments

Label Cloud

Pay no attention to the people behind the curtain

Powered By Blogger

Wednesday, February 28, 2007

More MPS School Board News

by folkbum

• District 2: While it may be embarrassing for Joe Dannecker to have the names of the schools in his district; it's completely another one to run afoul of campaign finance laws:
Oddly, [Progressive Majority Wisconsin's] crack research team hasn’t been able to find six campaign finance reports Spence was required to file with the Milwaukee Board of Election Commissioners since 2000.
For someone who campaigns on integrity and transparency, these failures are not insignificant.

• City-Wide: Ken Mobile checks Bruce Thompson's finance report, and thinks Thompson may have been fibbing a bit at a candidate forum earlier this month:
A finance report that was filed February 11, 2007 with Milwaukee’s election commission indicates that during the recent reporting period Thompson raised $15,950.00. Of that figure, $8,375.00 is from outside of Milwaukee and $3,300.00 is from out of state.

Interestingly enough, the question was asked during a School Board Candidate forum in Bay View on February 7th about his campaign finances. [Read my take on his answer here; listen to the audio at Terry Falk's site, track seven, with Thompson speaking first.]

Now, according to his finance report, Thompson is acting as his own Treasurer. I am sorry; I can’t buy “hasn’t done that analysis yet for this year” nonsense when he filed his report just four days later. After all, his campaign finance report is a list of who’s who of pro school vouchers and contains large contributions from many private sector CEO’s. Over 52% of his funding comes from outside of Milwaukee and over 21% comes from out of state. Many of these contributions where made well before the February 7th candidate forum; I guess he wasn’t in step with his finance report or had a momentary loss of memory.
Ken has more specifics about who some of those donors are. I'm not surprised by those numbers--or the names and occupations of his donors--but if he was obfuscating at the forum, he deserves to be called on it.

On the other hand, though, the emails that I get from Thompson's campaign pretty clearly list someone else as his treasurer. Here's a screen shot:Thompson TreasurerThat was from an email I received on February 9, right between the forum and the filing of the campaign finance report. So I'm not sure what to make of all of it, and whether the treasurer discrepancy wil end up being a problem. I know Thompson's campaign manager; if he wishes to respond, I'll accord him space.

No comments: