Ethics board considers crackdown on campaign money use

County panel renews effort to put more teeth into finance rules

The Santa Fe County Ethics Board wants to know if counties can impose campaign spending rules that are stricter than state law.

The five-member volunteer board, which reportedly stopped holding regular meetings last spring, recently renewed its efforts after county commissioners earlier this year approved new members to serve two-year terms. Part of their responsibility is to review the county’s code of conduct and recommend changes.

The ethics board is picking up the task following hours of work put in by previous members. In the fall of 2014, the board proposed ethics code revisions, but county commissioners did not act on them. The current board is now focusing on putting more teeth into campaign finance rules, such as by limiting how candidates can use leftover campaign cash. Some of the proposals it is considering would make the county rules more stringent than state campaign finance law.

The Santa Fe County Commission created the volunteer ethics board in 2010 amid a sheriff ’s office investigation into corruption allegations. The probe eventually led to criminal convictions of the co-owners of an asphalt company and a former county public works director who took bribes from them for paving work on county roads. But The New Mexican reported earlier this year that the ethics board has never considered an ethics case, and that commissioners didn’t even vote on its proposed changes to the code of conduct.

County Deputy Manager Tony Flores has charged the board with making another attempt to recommend code changes to the County Commission for a vote.

Anna Hansen, one of three newly elected commissioners, had asked the ethics board to clarify rules on how candidates for county office can spend campaign cash after an election. The state campaign finance law gives candidates many options, including paying down debt, donating funds to other campaign committees or even stashing the cash for a re-election run.

Ethics board member Michael Rosan-

balm said he thinks the state law gives candidates too much flexibility in how they can spend excess cash. For instance, he said, donors to campaigns might feel betrayed if the cash they gave to one candidate ended up in the coffers of another.

The board has considered deleting language in the county code that allows candidates to use leftover campaign cash for purposes other than the initial campaign.

Board members also want to avoid allowing candidates who lose a race to keep campaign funds they have left for use in a subsequent election, Rosanbalm said.

John Blair, a spokesman for the Secretary of State’s Office, which enforces New Mexico’s Campaign Reporting Act, on Friday said in an email that he’s not aware of anything in state statutes “that would prohibit a county from creating stricter campaign finance rules in its ethics code.”

But Assistant County Attorney Cristella Valdez cautioned the ethics board members, saying state law is often unclear on the ability of a county ordinance to pre-empt state law.

“We wouldn’t know before we went to a judge whether these would be valid deletions,” she said.

Rosanbalm was on board with taking such a risk.

“I don’t like that you can carry over tons of money for the next campaign,” he said, “because it just perpetuates the political machine.”