LAWRENCE: Clean Elections final report expected in December

By Lea Kahn, Staff Writer
   The Clean Elections Committee, which had been charged with studying the issue of publicly financed municipal elections, expects to deliver a final report on its findings to Township Council next month.
   The advisory committee met last week, and agreed to write a short report for Township Council. The members agreed to write a one-page report in support of the proposal and a one-page report against it.
   Doris Weisberg, who co-chaired the committee with Michael O’Neil, told the committee members at the Nov. 19 meeting that she had been contacted by Municipal Attorney Kevin Nerwinski for the final report at the request of Township Council.
   At its March 26 meeting, the members voted 4-4 on a recommendation to use taxpayers’ dollars to pay for Township Council candidates’ political campaigns. The committee originally consisted of nine members, but one member resigned and a replacement was never appointed by Township Council.
   The committee expected to prepare a report last spring after it completed its mission, but there was some disagreement on the form that the report should take, Ms. Weisberg said. Then, the summer came and the group did not reconvene — until Mr. Nerwinski contacted her, she said.
   ”We can boil it down to a few paragraphs. It could be a page on either position,” Ms. Weisberg said at the Nov. 19 meeting. “I really don’t know what else to say. That’s really where we are.”
   ”The only thing I feel strongly about — this is my view, as a (representative) of the Lawrence League of Women Voters (on the committee) — is that it should go to the public (for a vote),” Ms. Weisberg said.
   The Clean Elections Committee was created by Township Council in 2007 to study whether the Township Council candidates’ campaign expenses should be picked up by the taxpayers instead of relying on privately raised campaign contributions.
   If the Clean Elections Committee had recommended creating a “clean elections” ordinance, Township Council could have put a referendum question on the Nov. 4 general election ballot. Voters would have had the final say-so on whether they want public money to be used for that purpose.
   The proposal to use taxpayer dollars to fund Township Council candidates’ political campaigns was suggested as the next step in campaign finance reform in Lawrence Township.
   Since 2004, Township Council has adopted a series of ordinances aimed at reining in the practice of “pay-to-play,” in which professionals contribute money to a candidate’s campaign in return for no-bid public contracts.
   State law allows Township Council to award contracts to professionals such as architects, attorneys, engineers and planners without first seeking competitive bids. The pay-to-play ordinances limit the amount of money that a professional can donate to a candidate’s campaign and still be in the running for a no-bid contract.
   Proponents of publicly funded municipal political campaigns also have said that eliminating the need for candidates to rely on private campaign contributions also would have the effect of equalizing campaign spending.