By Steven T. Jones
It turns out that Mayor Gavin Newsom’s secret raid on the public financing fund was even worse than I wrote about yesterday. As the electoral reform advocates discovered yesterday afternoon, and the Chronicle reported this morning, Newsom took $2.3 million from the fund without indicating so in his budget or letting the Board of Supervisors know.
So right now, according Ethics Department officials that administer the fund, it contains just $500,000. And that fund is supposed to pay for public financing in both next year’s Board of Supervisors races and the 2011 mayor’s race, which are expected to total more than $5 million, possibly much more.
Newsom proposes to put $1.9 million into the fund in the coming fiscal year and Ethics officials say he has promised them another $1.9 million the next year, leaving it short of where it would need to be if the supervisorial candidates qualify for more than last year’s $1.3 million and more than a couple mayoral candidates opt for public financing. Then again, Newsom opposed the program from the beginning, so maybe that’s just part of his plan.