Royce Kelley

Jan 052017
 

Democrat Donkey

ACDCC Passes Strong Resolution Urging No Collaboration between Local Law Enforcement and Trump Administration

Last night, the Alameda County Democratic Central Committee (ACDCC) swore in (ceremoniously, as it turned out) its new membership.  It wasn’t very different than its old one.  Six of our 33 elected members are new, but three of them had previously been alternate members.  In Assembly District 18, where we actually elected three new members, the three defeated incumbents will now be alternates.  The Committee’s Chair remains the same, as do the two secretaries.  The Vice Chair is now the Treasurer and the Treasurer has now been hired to be the professional accountant/treasurer.  We do have a new Vice Chair, who was elected after the outgoing Vice Chair made a surprise announcement at the meeting that he would not seek re-election.  Before members had a moment to digest these news, nominations for his position were closed and a vote had been called for the sole candidate.  Business as usual at the Democratic Party.

There were a few changes with respect to Assembly District Vice-Chairs.  The ACDCC is divided into five caucuses, one for each Assembly District that falls within Alameda County.  The vice chairs for AD 15, 20 and 25 remained the same, but AD 16 decided to replace the incumbent vice-chair, who had rarely been seen in the last three years, with her closest acolyte.  Neither were present at the meeting.  In AD 18, after a lot of behind-the-scenes drama and machinations, the incumbent Vice Chair was forced out, two activist members were sidelined and Assemblymember Rob Bonta‘s paid staffer and alternate member, was put in.  Once again, business as usual.

Less business as usual was the resolution we passed, unanimously, that urges local City Councils and the Board of Supervisors to declare “themselves to be Sanctuary Cities and refuse to honor any request by the Trump Administration to use any of their resources, including Police and Sheriff’s Deputies to participate in any arrests or internments mandated by the Trump Administration.”   This is a move that I wished we had done a long time before, given the Obama administration widespread use of local police power to make immigration-related arrests.  But I am thrilled that we passed this now.  Now, we need to work to make sure City Councils in Alameda County implement this resolution.

And while minor, there have been  changes.  Two of the new elected members, Guillermo Elenes and Pamela Price, are avowed civil rights activists that come to the Committee planning to push an agenda of progressive reform.  Newly elected Congressman Ro Khanna has named as his alternate former Marine and Bernie Sanders delegate Cullen Tiernan, who along with a few other alternates and associates are bringing the energy of the Bernie Sanders movement to the Committee.  Cheryl Cook-Kallio, who unsuccessfully ran for Assembly against the Republican incumbent in AD 16, has joined as an ex-officio member and her experience as an award winning Government teacher already proved useful in helping us shape the resolution described above.

Ultimately, it’s anyone’s guess whether the forces of change will defeat those of stagnation, a happy medium will be reached, or the whole thing will blow up.  I’m betting on the first.

 

Aug 122014
 

Democrat DonkeyI May Be Responsible for the FPPC Investigating the Committee

Update (January, 2017): A Democratic Party organ laundered $60K in contributions for the Fremont Mayor race. Read more about it.

The leadership of the Committee has been working to expel me, though perhaps they were thwarted on that idea by the fact that they don’t have any legal grounds to do so.

Update (October, 2016): They ACDCC never censured me. Instead, they recruited a candidate to run for City Council against my husband in Nov. 2014.   Then in 2016, the incumbents in my district ran for re-election on a slate that excluded me.  I won re-election anyway.

Update (Aug 12, 2014)

The FPPC has cleared the ACDCC of wrongdoing, saying they have found “insufficient evidence” that the Committee is involved in an “earmarking scheme”.   I’m not particularly surprised given that when an FPPC investigator contacted me about this matter, she stated that earmarking was very difficult to prove.  For that reason, I had been surprised when I later learned the FPPC was still pursuing the investigation.

What I think the FPPC’s investigation does make clear is that earmarking is not only wrong, but illegal.  I can only hope that, armed with this knowledge, the Committee will cease the practice and use funds received for member-to-member communications to promote all endorsed candidates in a given ballot, rather than those whose supporters ponied up the money for the mailer.  Alternatively, I hope the Committee will disclose in the mailers themselves who has given the Committee the funds to send a mailer in support of a given candidate.

Original Post (Marh 21, 2014):

I recognize that writing this article has the potential of hurting me – and even my husband – politically. However, I believe that I have a responsibility to keep my constituents informed about what’s going on in the ACDCC, even when the subject is discomfiting to myself.

At the last Alameda County Democratic Central Committee (ACDCC) meeting earlier this month, Robin Torello, the Committee’s Chair, announced that the California Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC) was investigating the Committee for campaign finance law violations.  The ACDCC’s Executive Committee had hired lawyers, but needed a vote of the whole Committee to authorize payment for their services. At $300 an hour, the legal bill was likely to be hefty.  FPPC fines, someone chimed in, might be assessed against the Chair or even the Members.

According to Torello,  the investigation had come about because “a member of the Committee” had repeatedly called the FPPC and had written “a blog” that had drawn the FPPC’s interest.  When another member asked who that member was, I spoke out.

I hadn’t, actually, called the FPPC, but last December, I was contacted by an FPPC investigator.  She wanted me to expand on a comment I had written on a story about how Democratic Senators were seeking to strengthen campaign finance laws:

The Democratic Party needs to start by cleaning up our own house. It’s disingenuous for anyone in this party to talk about disclosure of financial contributors, while the party itself takes advantage of any loopholes in the disclosure laws.

I’m a member of the Alameda County Democratic Central Committee (ACDCC) and I was appalled to find out that current policy and practice is for the ACDCC to take financial contributions from PACs and others earmarked to help a specific candidate that has been endorsed by the ACDCC. The party uses that money to send out a mailer on behalf of the candidate in question. The mailer will say “paid for the ACDCC”, and there will be no mention of who is actually funding it.

The point, of course, is for a person or PAC to be able to support a candidate without having to be seen as doing so. Let’s say you are the PAC of a union representing City Hall employees. Your union is in the middle of contract negotiations with the City. Mayor John Smith is running for re-election. You want to give him a big, big check to make him look kindly at you – but if you do that, or if you send out a mailer on his behalf, his opponents will pounce at him with allegations of bribery. What do you do? Well, you give the money to the ACDCC. Mayor Smith will find out where the money came from, of course, but it can’t be traced back to you, at least quickly enough for anyone to use it.

I find this extremely unethical, but I brought this up at our last Committee meeting and apparently I’m alone on having those feelings. :-(“

(Note: comments on the Political Blotter that were left before the blog started using the Disqus commenting service are no longer visible in a browser, but they can be seen by viewing the page source).

The members of the Committee had heard my complaints about the unethical nature of these practices before.  I had first found out about then during the 2012 general election, when I received a mailer ostensibly paid by the Alameda County Democratic party asking me to vote for Jim Prola for San Leandro City Council.  Prola was the Party’s endorsed candidate, but he was the popular incumbent in an easy race running against a candidate that had very little money.  His re-election was pretty much assured, and I questioned why we would spend scant party resources on him, rather than on endorsed candidates that were in much more tenuous positions.

The explanation I got was that candidates or their supporters raise the money for the Party to send a mailer on their behalf.  The Party does it and takes a cut.    When I raised concerns about how this practice deceived voters by not letting them know who was actually behind the mailers, I was summarily banned by the Chair from posting on the Committee’s mailing list.  I also brought up the ethical issues surrounding this practice at the Committee meeting following the 2012 general election, but nobody echoed my concerns.

I didn’t contact the FPPC about these issues, however.   Partly, this was because I saw it an an ethical rather than a legal issue – even in my comment, I spoke about “loopholes” in the law.  A larger part, however, is that going to the “cops” is just not my style.   The way I saw it, the problem with this practice is that voters are misled as to who is really paying for a particular mailer. The solution is to inform voters and the press that whenever they see the “paid by the Democratic Party” phrase, they need to dig deeper as to the real financial source behind the publication.

I made the decision, however, to not write about this practice during the 2012 campaign season.  Honestly, I was concerned that anything I wrote that painted the Democratic party in a negative light could be use by Republicans against Obama and other Democratic candidates.  Perhaps the risk of Fox News noticing and running amok with the story was low, but I wasn’t willing to take it.  I still don’t know if it was the right answer ethically.  After the campaign, I made that comment in the Political Blotter blog and hoped to revisit the issue closer to next election.

***

After the Committee members voted to approve hiring lawyers, a member of the ACDCC’s Executive Committee, Angela Ramirez Holmes, moved to have me censured.  While Torello had accused me of calling the FPPC repeatedly, she couldn’t actually back up the accusation so Ramirez Holmes’ used the comment I copied above as the rationale for the censure.  She said that I should have used internal mechanisms to air my complaint and spoke about an alleged subcommittee on member-to-member communications.  I had never heard of such subcommittee before and neither had many of my colleagues.

Ramirez Holmes also complained about my other writings.  While she did not specify what writings she was referring to, I have a fairly good idea about one particular piece that she is unlikely to have taken kindly.    Last year, after I started my second term in the Committee, I wrote a blog posting about my decision to vote against Royce Kelley for Committee Vice-Chair.  At the time, Kelley was still listed as Ramirez Holmes partner in Alliance Campaign Strategies, a campaign management company.   The company represents candidates for local office, including those seeking the Democratic endorsement, and also handled the member-to-member communications for the ACDCC.   Both Ramirez Holmes and Kelley served on the Executive Committee, which proposes which candidates should receive the Democratic endorsement. I had heard from multiple former clients of theirs, as well as other people involved in the local political scene, that candidates felt they had to hire Alliance Campaign Strategies if they wanted to receive the Democratic endorsement, or at least block it from going to their opponent.  While I took pains to point out in my article that I was not accusing them of wrongdoing, the mere perception that a candidate got an unfair advantage by hiring the firm is harmful to the democratic process and the Democratic party.    While Royce Kelley is no longer associated with the firm, Ramirez Holmes is still in business and apparently representing candidates seeking the party’s endorsement for the June 2014 election.

While Ramirez Holmes wants me censured, she requested that the Committee not vote on it until the FPPC investigation is over – which the Chair assured the Committee would not take long.  This reinforces the notion that the original rationale for the censure was the investigation, rather than my writings.  While I didn’t call the FPPC myself, I don’t believe there is anything ethically wrong for a member of a Central Committee who has doubts about the legality of what its leadership is doing, to voice those concerns to the agency charged with overseeing campaign finance law.  It worries me greatly that the censure is meant to discourage members of other County Central Committees from whistle blowing.  Those are exactly the type of undemocratic practices that I feel compelled to challenge.

I will admit that I don’t particularly enjoy the idea of being censured by colleagues.  However, I cannot attach credibility to a censure unless it’s based on an ethical lapse on my part or on my failure to keep the commitments I made to voters when I ran for ACDCC.    For instance, if the consensus among Democrats was that I should not have put the Party above the voters and I that should have exposed the unethical member-to-member communication program back in October 2012, I would take that rebuke to heart.   But a censure that is based on bringing light to a problematic practice by the Party, only brings shame to the Party.  It is time the Democratic Party start living by the principles it espouses, not just expect others to do so.  We must fight Citizens United and other decisions that equate money with speech, but we must not enter into the temptation of playing similar games.  We need public funding for elections, but until we get that, at the very least voters deserve to know who is spending money to get a candidate elected.  The Democratic Party should not be helping to hide it.

Note: When I ran for re-election to the ACDCC in 2012, I joined a slate of incumbent candidates. The slate put out a mailer which was produced by Alliance Campaign Strategies.

Marga Lacabe is an elected member of the ACDCC representing AD 18. These articles are meant to update her constituents on what’s going on at the party.

Jan 032013
 

Note: This arDemocrat Donkeyticle was originally published here.

Update on January ACDCC meeting: Members Sworn In and Party officers elected. I cast sole vote against having a paid campaign manager as local party Vice-Chair.

Last night was the first meeting of the Alameda County Democratic Central Committee of the year, as well as the swearing-in of the elected and re-elected members of the Committee. We were sworn in by Senate Majority Leader and San Leandro native Ellen Corbett, in a very uneventful ceremony.

Every member of the Committee, including “ad-hoc” members (Democrats elected to state and national offices who live in Alameda county), picks an alternate who can represent them when they can’t make it to the meetings. The alternates then have to be approved by the whole committee. My alternate this term is Tim Holmes. He is the owner of Zocalo Coffeehouse in San Leandro (where many a Democratic event has taken place), and a co-founder of the San Leandro Community Action Network. He is one of the most influential political voices in San Leandro, but he is also very liberal, perhaps even as liberal as I am. He is a better communicator, however.

We also voted to approve the Committee’s delegates to the state convention (basically, all the Committee members plus some of the alternates) and for Committee officers (Chair, Vice Chair, Recording Secretary, Corresponding Secretary and Treasurer). All of the latter ran unopposed and all but one were unanimously approved.

The one exception was Royce Kelley, who was running to be re-appointed Vice-Chair of the Committee. He is currently one of the state party’s regional directors. There was one vote against him: mine. I could not in good conscience vote for him, given the conflict of interest that holding his position signifies.

Royce Kelley is one of the principals at Alliance Campaigns Strategies. He and Angela Ramirez-Holmes, another member of the Committee, specialize in managing the political campaigns of Democrats running for office in Alameda county.

Candidates for local office usually seek the endorsement of the Democratic Party as a “seal of approval” to use in their literature; in the case of local candidates for non-partisan office, this means endorsement by the county Central Committee. Candidates are first interviewed by the Committee’s Executive Board, which is composed of the Chair, Vice-Chair, Treasurer, Secretaries and the District Vice-Chairs (each AD delegation gets to appoint its own vice-chair). The Executive Board then votes on which candidates should be put on the consent calendar to get the party’s endorsement. While it’s possible for regular Committee members to pull candidates from the consent calendar, it’s pretty rare. Usually, if you make it to the consent calendar, the endorsement is yours.

Both Kelley and Ramírez-Holmes are members of the Executive Board, as was their former partner, Shawn Wilson. Robin Torello, the Committee Chair, is very close to Kelley and they often speak with one voice. What this means is that Alliance Campaigns has an inordinate amount of influence on who gets the Democratic endorsement in Alameda county.

Now, I will not presume to say that Kelley and Ramirez-Holmes vote or lobby for the candidates that have hired them. However, they do seem to have represented quite a few candidates that have gotten the Democratic endorsement, even when running against more progressive candidates. And many candidates believe that they must hire Alliance Campaign if they want to get the Democratic endorsement, or at least prevent their opponents from getting it. I find this very problematic from an ethical point of view. A democratic system that is not or has the appearance of not being clean, an endorsement system that is based on something other than an objective evaluation of who is the best candidate for that often, is a corrupt and undemocratic system. And that’s what I ran to stand up against.

I understand why even fellow committee members who agree with me, are reluctant to speak out loud about this matter. If you hope to have a political career, it’s not a good idea to make powerful enemies. But I also believe that we need to vocally stand for what we believe, and I believe in a fair and open process

Marga Lacabe was is an elected member of the ACDCC representing AD 18. These articles are meant to update her constituents on what’s going on at the party.