County owes $14K in campaign filing fines
Local GOP, Green Party also on list of those with fines for late filings
Politicians, lobbyists and campaign donors owe approximately $2 million in fines to the California Secretary of State’s office for tardy disclosure reports allowing outstanding fines to languish without consequence. A handful of Humboldt County locals are on the list.
The debts are owed by a range of political players, according to a list published on the California Secretary of State’s website that details outstanding fines as of April 1. It shows fines owed by 26 state lawmakers and 21 superior court judges, as well as former legislators, losing candidates, ballot measure campaigns,
Democratic and Republican clubs, and corporate and labor-backed political action committees.
According to the Secretary of State’s website, “If a campaign or lobbying disclosure form is filed with the Secretary of State after a statutory deadline, the filer is liable for a fine of $10 per day late until the form is filed (California Government Code Section 91013).”
The Secretary of State’s spreadsheet of outstanding fines dates back to 2004 and does not indicate a single increase in penalties.
Humboldt County, the Humboldt County Republicans and the Green Party of Humboldt County appear on the list several times and collectively owe about $17,000.
County Administrative Officer Amy Nilsen, listed as the responsible officer on behalf of the County of Humboldt, owes four separate fines from 2019 and 2020 totaling $14,740.
Former Eureka City Council candidate Floyd Joseph Bonino owes two fines totaling $1,460 filed through the Humboldt County Republicans in 2012.
Northern Humboldt Unified School District board of trustees member Dana Silvernale owes $729 from 2019 on behalf of the Green Party of Humboldt.
The county of Humboldt, Bonino and Silvernale did not return the Times-Standard’s request for comment ahead of print deadline.
Many of the 2,780 listed fines are very small. About 300 of them are less than $100, reflecting paperwork filed a few days late — a routine violation of campaign finance law that’s the political equivalent of a parking ticket.
However, 45 of the fines are more than $10,000. The largest outstanding fine for a public official is nearly $38,000 owed by Alameda County Superior Court Judge Jennifer Madden stemming from her 2016 campaign.
Though the $2 million in unpaid fines are a tiny portion of California’s more than $200 billion annual budget, it raises the question as to whether the state is effectively enforcing a law designed to increase transparency and prevent corruption.
“The fact that these fines (on politicians and judges) can go unpaid without any consequence, it’s definitely an illustration of privilege,”
Natasha Minsker, a lobbyist who has pushed for more leniency in traffic fines, told CalMatters.
The lax enforcement is a far cry from the experience ordinary Californians face if they, for example, neglect to pay a traffic ticket. Those fines increase when people don’t pay. Eventually, people can be charged with a misdemeanor for not paying, or have their tax refunds seized through a debt collection process.
“Once you get a fine in the criminal justice system, it compounds and increases and it easily takes over your life if you are low-income,” Minsker said.
California Secretary of State Shirley Weber told CalMatters she would look into the issue to see if any changes can be made but said the issue persisted long before she took office in January.
“It’s a large amount of money, and so the question is: What can we legitimately do?” Weber said. “They’ve done things in the past, (but) what good is a fining system if you can’t enforce it?”