Thank you. Welcome, everyone, to the public services and infrastructure committee meeting of March 6, 2025. Can I please have a roll call? I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. motion for approval. Move approval. All in favor? Aye. OK. Well, thank you, everyone, for being here today. We have, as an item before us, the public funding for elections. This is an item that Councilmember Floyd had brought back in December 1, 2022. So it's finally made its way over here. And we also have Brett Petagrew from our City Attorney's Office, so I'll turn it over to Councilmember Floyd, so he can kind of tell us a little bit about this before we start going. Thank you very much. If you saw the backgrounds, I, you can see my new business item that has some rationale. You can also see a memo from me that goes into a little more depth. I'll just go over some of it quickly. So I put this new business item in pretty much immediately following our election in 2022 because we put an item on the ballot moving our election dates from off-year or odd year elections to even year elections. And you know I generally gave a little bit of pushback back then just because of some concerns not because I disagreed with like the outcomes or anything. We changed the election date for a couple of reasons in my mind, which you can see outline one is the cost was escalating significantly. I did not have it at the time of writing this memo, but I do have it now. Moving the election dates saved us around over a million million on our elections, around 1.3 million was the estimate at the time and I do think that ended up being quite accurate. So we did get a significant cost savings and we also wanted to increase voter participation which the odd year elections had about half the turnout of the even year elections. So we saw that come to fruition this past year with our first election under this new cycle. I had outlined a couple of issues I had at the time. The first was the cost for a candidate running for office has been going up significantly over the past decade I'd say. Many of the campaigns, including many of ours, spent over $100,000. And I think that moving the election cycles creates a necessity to, or an incentive to spend even more money because you're competing with bigger offices for attention and media time and then, relatedly, the other issue I was worried about was the potential for our local elections to get overshadowed and under-discussed because of more high-profile elections taking place at the time, particularly the presidential, gubernatorial, congressional, senatorial campaigns. So I submitted this new business item because I think those things are couldn't be mitigated by a program like this. We'll hear the legal concerns and process here in just a minute and the different types of programs that exist. I have a slight preference, but I'm open to all of these and whichever and I my preference would be for us to do something as simple and legally defensible as possible. Should everyone be interested and my goals are to put a counterbalance against you know the influence of big money in our municipal politics as well as engage our citizenry more wholly. Same, I think, aim that we had in changing the elections dates. And last two things I'll mention, last three things are one. This could have come, I think, a little bit. Could have come last year, but I think we waited a little bit because there was a referendum in amendment on the ballot statewide to repeal the state's program, which I thought was a good basis for us to create a program. That amendment failed and notably it got less than 50% in every single precinct in the city of St. Petersburg showing that there's broad appeal to this type of program in our city. And then the other thing is there's a couple of articles in here. One describes the multitude of programs that exist across the country and the other one describes the need for this kind of program. That's for y'all to check out. Hopefully you had a chance to look at it. And then my last thing is I'm bringing this here today to try to get feedback from the group. to see if this is even something as a council we're interested in. We saved a significant amount of funding by changing the election cycle. My thinking was that could be used to offset some of the negative, possible negative effects of changing the cycle. And should people be interested, express an interest in moving forward. We'd be happy to actually outline what a local program would look like and bring some outside experts in to have a discussion about how we could implement this and what would be most effective and also most simple to administer. So I will leave it there. Thank you all for entertaining this idea and I'll let Brett get on with the legal aspect of it because there's a lot to it. Mr. Pedagrew, you brought a very good legal memo. If you can laugh us through your memorandum, it would be wonderful. Thank you, Chair, members of council. Again, Brett Petagrew with the City Attorney's Office. I'll be talking about public financing generally, the types of programs that exist, some information on the Florida programs, and the policy decisions that we drive, a program here in St. Petersburg, if council decided to pursue it. So when we are talking about campaign finance, as you know, candidate campaigns for elected office are usually funded by contributions from either the candidate himself or herself, or from outside contributors. And when we're talking about public campaign finance, we're talking about a different source. We're talking about public dollars that are being used to fund a campaign. And at an extremely high level, a candidate would accept these public funds in exchange for abiding by limitations that go above and beyond what a candidate would ordinarily be required to do as a matter of law. The rationale for implementing these programs is a matter of policy. It's related to and drives legal considerations. So policy is going to come up, but it's ultimately, that is not going to be the focus of my presentation. And as you'll see from the programs in the memo and just thinking through this, there are all sorts of different directions that this could go depending on what the program is designed to achieve. So the three major types of programs are grant, matching, and voucher. A grant program provides a candidate with a lump sum payment of public funds to use for campaign purposes. The Miami-Dade program described in the memo is a grant program. It's a partial grant program. There are other variations in use that are sometimes called full grant or clean election where the candidate foregoes any other private contributions after accepting the public funds usually because they've run up against the total amount that they could raise for a campaign. Matching programs, a candidate gets public funds that match contributions from the private contributions. The Florida program is a matching program. These are usually subject to limitations. The matching is on where the person contributing is from, how much the contribution is. Matching programs, you got a one-to-one basis dollar for dollar or they can be at a higher ratio to magnify the impact of certain types of contributions. The final type is a voucher program. Voucher program provides instead of the money going directly from the government to the the candidate based on a formula in law, a voucher program provides eligible residents with a credit of public funds that the citizen can then assign to the donate to the candidate and then the candidate redeems those to get the public funds. There are no examples of a voucher program operating in Florida and as I discuss in the memo and a little bit later on, that's the one that would be most complicated to under Florida law to implement. So according to the Brennan Center for Justice, there are some form of public campaign finance program in 14 states, including Florida, and 26 localities, including Miami Dade. The memo uses a four-part framework to try to explain the specifics of these programs that was used in a recent United States government general accountability office report on this topic, talks about goals, funding and revenue, qualification of participation, and oversight. So the memo provides a deep dive into the Florida program and the Miami-Dade program. I'm not going to go quite that deep at this time. You're welcome to, I'm happy to answer questions about it, but I'd like to talk about some differences in commonalities. In terms of the funding and revenue source, the biggest difference between the two is the overall structure. Florida again again, is a matching program. Miami-Dade is a grant program. So in the Florida program, only certain contributions qualify for the match. You get a two to one match for all of the contributions you need to qualify, and then it switches to one to one for the contributions after that. There are different thresholds depending on the office. The gubernatorial candidates can get more than have a different threshold to qualify and where the match switches than cabinet level. And they're paid out on a rolling basis. So once you get that first set of matches, depending on the campaign finance report, the state doles out as you go, and as it gets closer to the campaign, it becomes on a weekly basis. The Miami-Dade program is much simpler. A candidate that qualifies gets a single lump sum payout. There are different thresholds depending on the office and there's two tiers within County Commissioner. In both cases there is a trust fund and if finance is listening I know that we can't have a true trust fund under Florida law. I think that they are called trust funds for both of these programs. They're provided by a variety of sources, but in both cases, there is a requirement that appropriations be made to truce these up, make sure there's enough funding to pay out what a candidate has agreed to receive an exchange for abiding by the program requirements. Switching to qualification and participation for a candidate, both of them require the candidate to be opposed. Both programs, Florida and Miami-Dade, provide that only certain types of contributions qualify. They're geographic restrictions in both cases, so in Florida it's got to be a state resident. There's no cap on the size of the contribution that would qualify, but only the first 250 would be matched. The Miami-Dade program only contributions within a range of $100 to $500 qualify. So one of the features that you'll see in a lot of these programs is they're intended to amplify small dollar contributions And so that's why in the Miami-Dade program you see this only only the 100-500 contributions are used as qualifying Both the state and county programs limit the types of contributions that can be accepted Both of them limit a candidate from providing personal funds to the campaign and the Florida program also limits the ability to accept contributions from political parties at various levels. Both of the programs limit the types of expenditures that you can make. Those can be overall expenditures. Miami-Dade's program has a limit on the public funds specifically that they can't be used for certain things that would be permissible for private contributions but aren't for the public funds I'll also note that the Brennan Center One of the Brennan Center documents that I read about this actually suggests that expenditure limits shouldn't be included in the programs for what that's worth Then finally in the oversight category both the state and the county programs that I looked at and forward to require additional documentation to substantiate the qualifying contributions are in fact real. Both of them have an audit requirement and both have penalties for noncompliance. So, if council wanted to implement a program like this in the city of St. Petersburg the To keep in mind generally the state writes its own laws and is limited only by federal and state constitution So they have wide latitude to permit a program as they see fit the Miami-Dade has unique home role powers among the various counties, so they have the ability to do certain things that no other local government in state of Florida can do. And so the city has less ability to, is more restricted in its ability to do this than either of the programs that we looked at. So the memo talks about three different issues. The first is general preemption. The state, the city exists because the state says it exists. The city can, unless it's prohibited by the federal or state constitutions, it can restrict the city's ability to do almost anything, and it could say that a public campaign finance program isn't allowed at any time and for any reason. So that's the case for any program that this council would ever look at. So that's not unique to this, but it's something to keep in mind, I think, in view of the state's recent attempt to cancel this at the state level, and there's even, we see lots of preemption in the election context, currently a bill pending that would force local governments to go onto even your election cycle and strip the local government's ability to pick their own election dates. So that's the headwind that we'd be going into with a program like this. The second legal issue that I brought up was the statutory contribution limit. under state law candidates from municipal election are limited to a thousand dollars per person. Now, a person is a key word. In most cases under state law, person does not include government. It includes individual people, flesh and blood people. It includes corporate entities that are made formed by and made up of people. It usually does include governments. And I think think in this context, it would have to not include governments because if that were the case, it would prohibit candidates from the state matching program from getting hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, from the state matching program. So I think in this case, for a matching tight program, or a grant tight program where the money was being going, was going directly from the government to a candidate under a formula provided by law. I don't think that statutory $1,000 per contribution person limit would be an issue. Voucher program slightly more complicated because it's the voucher is going to the person and the person's giving the voucher to the campaign and then the campaignems that for money. There could be an argument that that voucher should be counted against the contribution limit per person. And so if we were going to go down that road, we would want to seek some legal guidance from the division of elections on that. The frequency of that guidance has dropped off sharply over the last few years from the Attorney General's Office and the division, but we would certainly, if we were to go down that road, we would certainly still attempt to get it. The final legal consideration are the statutory, the preemption of municipal contribution limits at a state, there is a state preemption that was enacted several years ago on the, it says that local governments can't enact contribution limits that differ from the statutory standards. That was what actually led to the city repealing its local campaign final ordinance that was on the books for a couple years. And again, I think we would seek contribution, we would seek guidance from the state if we were to do something like this to see if that applies. If the city was going to go down this road, there are a lot of policy questions that would be driving that. So the Brennan Center reports, the General Accounting Office reports, talk about this at a very high level. There's generally a correlation between the type of program that you're going to pick and what is your main thrust of your program. So grant programs by giving a lump sum of money, the best seen as the best tool to reduce barriers to entry for a potential candidate, including ones that don't have a lot of connections, don't have a lot of fundraising experience. If you collect a certain amount of contributions, here's a big chunk of money to get your campaign billy. Matching programs are seen to amplify the impact of smaller contributions. You still have to do that small dollar fundraising. The more of it you do, the more matching you get. So you still have to do the fundraising, but it can amplify the impact of smaller contributions. And then the voucher programs are seen to expand overall citizen engagement by giving, by allowing citizens who would not normally have the disposable income to participate in the electoral process by making contributions. It would give them, it would allow them to direct funding towards certain candidates and not others. That's the big question, because that drives what some of the other policy considerations council would have to look at on the funding and revenue side. How much funding would be available to each candidate? What would the formula be? What would the matches be? What would the grant amounts be? Would it differ from candidate, the office to office? Would it differ based on primary versus general. If it was match, are there different matching ratios and where would you switch from one to the other? And then the big question, where would the funding come from? The next bucket of qualification and participation requirements, council would need to look at is the decision to participate irrevocable. If not, what happens a candidate that started down this road and started to receive public funding wanted to get out of the program to go back to the default rules and stop inviting by it. How would you unwind that? Would you ask for additional certification or training from a candidate or candidate treasurers in terms of the qualifying contributions which is really a key feature of the matching and grant type programs. What's the number? Are they limited to certain amounts? Do they just contributions from a flesh and blood person, a natural person, as it's called in law sometimes, or would a business work? Is there a geographic limitation? We have a unique structure in St. Petersburg elections where we essentially have a closed primary based on geography and then a general election that's city wide. So for a matching program for a council office, if there was a geographic limitation, would it be based on the district, or would it be city wide? Under the charter, ultimately candidates do represent the city as a whole. Do they need to reach a certain threshold in the aggregate or is just the amount of those contributions enough? Would there be limits on contributions to the campaign, which I mentioned earlier, may be preempted, would there be limits on expenditures? both of the state programs we see have them, but we've got at least one outside group suggesting that that's not a good feature that you should allow campaigns just with there be limits on expenditures. Both of the state programs we see have them, but we've got at least one outside group suggesting that that's not a good feature that you should allow campaigns to spend as much as they want. If you do have limits on the expenditures, are those limited to all of the funds that the candidate has or are those limited to just the public funds as we saw from Miami-Dade? And then finally, for the oversight category, questions that council would want to ask in an answer what sort of additional documentation would be required for the contributions or their other types of documentation that you would want from a candidate related to the other requirements is there an audit requirement is it mandatory or discretionary is the thought of going to happen or is it just the city would have the right to do it? Is this available all the time or just after the election? Will the scope of the audit be limited to the public funds or all of the campaign funds? Another biggest question is enforcement. One of the things that we saw when we had campaign finance on the books several years ago was unlike the state, which has multiple entities that are charged with enforcing our election laws to one extent or another, each of which has its own enforcement powers and investigates worry powers. The city doesn't have that sort of subpoena power. So we would be relying on the agreement between the city and the candidate to participate in the program in exchange for receiving the public funds. And it would be a matter of essentially contract. When you promised if we gave you these public funds, you would agree to provide these things in return and now you're not doing it. But that would be enforced through essentially contract action rather than some sort of inherent police power to investigate and issue subpoenas and day into the details. So based on those policy decisions, if that's something the Committee and ultimately council wants to pursue, we would develop an ordinance for consideration by the Committee and for council. And although this could be placed in the charter for as a longstanding requirement, that step is not required. Any simple ordinance would be enough to implement a program like this. And with that, I appreciate your attention. And I'm happy to answer any questions you have. Thank you. Thank you, Brett. For that extensive explanation, I'm starting to get flashbacks of the conversation we have about the appointment process that Councilmember Gavardin, I started with all the detail. When you start talking about elections and you start thinking about all the rabbit holes, you can go down. The more you were talking, the more we're thinking about the appointment process that we started, that we still, by the way, haven't finished. So thank you for that. Before I get to some questions, I wanted to actually bring up Councilmember Floyd, actually talked a little bit about it, but I want to give some numbers because I was curious how much we saved, how much voter participation increased based on the changes. And Councilmember Floyd talked about the million dollars, obviously, that we saved. But I pulled up The the last races so we know what numbers were talking about changing our elections So it coincides with the governor's ray or the presidential race to state and federal races So back in 2019 when you had district one three five and 7 up for election. You had voter turnout of 33, a little bit over 33,000 in district 1, a little bit over 34,000 in district 3, a little bit over 33,000 in district 5, and in district 7 a little bit over 33,000. After the change to C or the or the districts that ran which is again district three, five and district seven we have the council members here that won those districts. The change caused the number of people to participate from the low 33s to 116,000 a little bit over that in district three, 114,000 in District 5, and then District 7, 114,000. That's a huge change. So there is no question that the change caused a big difference in voter participation. The elections that happen for my district and the other districts that run it at the time as the mayor runs are usually a little higher because the mayor was running. And I expect those to also go up as incrementally as the ones that went up. So I just want people to understand the participation rate is hugely different. So that's important to note. In terms of the money spent, I just pulled up some of the numbers and since we were talking about what is the effect of the changes, District five was around 110, $111,000 between the top two candidates. Councilmember Frick Sanders is here and the person who ran against her. District 3, the highest was $130,000, and the second highest was $82,000. But in District 7, the person who won spent the least. And that was $17,000. So to me, it's really interesting to kind of look at the numbers and where they are at. And so if you actually break that down by voter participation, your cost to reach people is actually lower because more people participated and your cost to reach everyone is much lower. My race when I ran, I couldn't get all the numbers from those races. I had to put in, I was told over $100,000 to run first city council race. I think most people probably here agree when they talk to candidates, they're going to say, you know, when you're consultants or essay, you're gonna have to spend around 100,000. By the way, I was gonna meet my 100,000. My opponent had put in 250 something thousand at the end in my race. And my consultants were like, well, you know, he's putting an XMM money. I'm like, I'm done, this is an arms race. You told me 100,000, I'm not raising any more money. I stopped raising money because at some point, there's only so much money you can put into something. And that's it. And so it's interesting because sometimes you see candidates who put in more money and lose can't, you know, and sometimes it works out the other way around. And so I just want to kind of throw that out there because it would be interesting to hear everyone's perspective. Obviously, everyone here has run for office. But the fact that we're thinking about kind of looking at this and seeing, you know, how we're gonna change this and whether it's gonna make any specific changes, whether to the system that may cause these things to kind of move the needle in any of these things. How is that affect these things in terms of voter participation, allowing outside money? How does that kind of fix some of the issues that have been raised? And if those issues are really issues that kind of affected these races here, because this was the only race after we changed the election that we can actually have an example. So I just kind of threw that out there and before we got started, but I think Council member, how harding you were the first one that raised your hand. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Council Member Floyd for bringing this up. It's a very very interesting topic that I spent a fair amount of time thinking about which I shouldn't have because Brett changed all that. Thank you very much for your presentation. That was very in-depth and and I think I understand much better. I struggle. I understand why handsome member Floyd brought this. I wrap my hands around that. I struggle with the other side. The, the, on its basic level, the, the, the, the, the idea that, that public funding would be used for me too, at its very basic level, apply for a job. I struggle with funding that, how that money gets used is irrelevant, and the public perception of that as well. And the other thing that I'm working through is that elected positions uniquely don't exist the same way that every other job in this room exists. And in order for Brett to apply for the job, he had to have a lot of agree in the very beginning and apply for a to run for office. There is no prerequisites of any kind in terms of bringing skills. And so the election itself becomes that limiting factor and there are things that go into that that qualify for the job. I am very interested in listening to what my colleagues have to say. I am inclined to pass, but I would like my opinion to be swayed. Thank you, Chair. Committee member. OK. So no other committee member? I mean, I was just given to committee first you Here you want to wait okay, okay council member Floyd and then and council member fake Sanders I was just gonna add some follow-up because Brett did give us quite a thorough explainer my intent is to to get feedback from committee members and before I ask legal and myself to dive in a hole that says we will design something, yeah I want to hear the feedback first because it would be something complicated to design but Brett told us a lot of things but but I think that my key takeaway is, is that if we were to move forward, I would work with him to present the most simple and easily administerable possibility with some options so that we could design it together as a group, but really try not to bring anything too complicated. For example, there was conversations about ensuring that funds are spent on specific items. I personally wouldn't support something like that because I feel it would be very hard to administer or expenditure caps. I think they're legally questionable and difficult to administer, so I wouldn't bring anything like that. Also think they're not advisable based off of the stuff that Brennan Center said, like with things like political committees nowadays, there's no way we can actually limit people's expenditures. So while there is a lot of considerations, I think I would bring something for that's very, very simple and as digestible as possible in order to, like Vice Chair Hannah would said, avoid us going on like this forever. And then just two comments about the couple of things that have been said by committee members so far. One is to your point council member, Hanoi, it's about the cost of elections like in each one. It's in the change, changing the cost. It's less about the individual elections and more about the trend that we've experienced as a city over the last decade. And then the other thing is to Council Member Harding's thing about the public perception. I think that question is just completely answered by, and that was why I waited till after the last election to have this discussion because if the public in St. Pete or across the state had voted to end the state's campaign financing program, I wouldn't know. I would have just been like, never mind. We wouldn't move this from the furrow list. But I waited until we got those results. And what we saw was a majority of people in every single precinct in St. Pete supported the state program. And so that's why I thought the public perception question, I waited until we got a pretty definitive answer on that before I brought it forward. So,, I'll leave it there for now. But yeah, again, my intent is to just get feedback because this could be a lot of work. And if people are interested, I'm willing to go do that work with legal. And I think legal's willing to do it with me as well. I think that Brett enjoyed having this conversation. And so that's my intent. Thank you. Councilmember Fakes Andrews. Thank you. So I thought this was really interesting being one of those first candidates that actually ran in the off cycle that I got so much morning against doing so but in order to say the city money I guess that was beneficial. First, lived experience, and I'm looking at your concerns, Councilman Floyd, when you talk about the escalation of costs it was. My first campaign won with maybe $42,000, And that's because it was a earning competition of the candidates. You know, it wasn't based on the district, it was based on candidates. So we may have been equally financially capable and that was because I think that candidate was like 44. So that's what that came out. This particular race, I had a lot of support as an incumbent, but then they were financially, they had money. I don't know what you're saying. So that raised that particular district. It wasn't that district five changed. It was the candidates that caused that number to go up. So I don't know how we can control that. The race being overshadowed here at Cattle of Soda. And it worked in my own my behalf. The small ones, because all the panels and things were concentrating on, you're absolutely right, the higher races. So it is your concern, but in my experience, it is a fact. I'm kind of in a grant with Councilmember Harding about the, and I just heard you talk about the public perception. If I had to take campaign dollars, I wouldn't want to take it from taxpayers that didn't intentionally directly give it to them. When people supported me, they supported me, and I appreciated that. And I was able to maneuver my expenses based on what my experiences were as a candidate and running. So keeping something, trying to keep it consistent amongst candidates is kind of, is that a part of the purpose? Is that the fundraising piece you want to everybody to build a setting level? I'm just trying to address all of. But making it easier for people who don't have connections to participate in our electoral process is a big part of that. Got you. Okay. So I'm thinking about this because as I'm reading it I'm still trying to compare this to lived experience. So yeah I'll leave it that, but I'm still not in that same round yet about using public funds for someone that... one of the things that I'm in here, one of the things about Grenney for Office is I know you might not already have the money, but a hard work comes with that and the majority of that hard work is fundraising. Hated, hated, hated, but how much skin would be in the game if someone just gave you money to run for office. Now, the positive side of that is that you have some very good candidates, very good potential candidates that just can't seem to raise that money and we're keeping them to their voices, silent, because they're concentrating on the dollars. So that's why I said, when I read this, I was just kind of very confused as to how I think about it, especially after the last experience, because you write my honest, it was like three times what I read, I'd raise the first time. So I'm still confused, and I just want to hear what everyone else says about it. But my experience is in rank. I'm still struggling with going by that state program. Thank you, too. Good points, councilmember, of FIG Sanders, because it is true in terms of who is in the race, depending on how much you have to raise. And my raise, my opponent, worth millions of dollars. So he had put in a ton of money. But you're going back to, I think, some of the things that have been said, what's interesting about our city council races is we have to run in our primary, which means, it's a close primary, it's what, 30 something, thousand, 33,000, 35,000 people in the district around there, Maybe more now, whatever the numbers are, but somewhere around there is what you're running in terms of your primary. And I think when you start seeing kind of what happens, the district really has to know you, which I think kind of helps can that it's even when people do have money, because we've had people that do have money come in, people that actually know you in the area, because that happened in my district, I just want to kind of like talk about a little bit, like what council member Figsander said, that happened when I ran, but people in my district, that was engaged in my district, people knew me, and I think that made a world of a difference when I ran. And so I think those things are intangibles, that especially in a closed primary do really matter, because of the way our system is, and every other system, you know, however, by the way, Miami-Dade County, you're talking a much bigger, broader subsection of people, or even the state in terms of reaching voters. The voters re-reach the most of the time. They're probably going to know us much better than they do at the state or county level, whatever. But I think those kind of things are just some intangibles that some of the council members and committee members here are touching up on from their experiences. So I just wanted to kind of add to council member Fakesanders and what she said. Because I found the money thing in my, that issue happened in my race. And I knew it was an arm's recent. At some point there's only so much you could do. But, Chair, thank you. Chair. Clarifying question real quick. So, these three programs, no matter which you choose, doesn't preclude you from accepting a donation from a business, it just enhances smaller donations essentially or gives you a lump sum if you hit some certain metric. Am I getting that right? There are a few programs out there that once you've accepted the money, those are the full grant or clean democracy, the idea being like those are really focused on trying to eliminate the perception of public interests. Like, well I got all my money from the government, no individual bought me and those are sometimes referred in as clean campaigns. Those obviously would be very expensive and I think you'd see the or more likely to see those in places that have a, like an existing cap on how much a candidate could raise. We don't have that in Florida. It's a per donor cap. So I don't, that would be very difficult to implement. One of those, some of them do both of the Florida programs, the state program and the Miami-Dade program, do put limits on how much you can give to yourself. Yeah, so that. that Miami to one has a limit on how much you can get from political party. A lot of these were designed prior to Citizens United prior to the Super PAC. So that's like another something that's off to the side as Councilmember Floyd mentioned. There are other avenues out there that unlimited monies can be spent in support of. I mean, that's kind of where I was dovetailing to, which is, it also doesn't preclude you from using soft money. None of these programs touch on that. They don't. This is really, these are the traditional traditional true directly under the control of the candidates campaign funds and you can ask them to forego certain types of outside donations but it's not a you don't have to have that as part of any of these. Okay. That's that's where I'm struggling in a couple of different areas and I and by way, I appreciate this much more than I thought I would. And so at the beginning of it, I was not enthusiastic to have this conversation. But frankly, I've learned a lot and going through this, I certainly was open to the conversation. and I appreciate both your memo, Council Member Floyd and your memo, Brett. But I just think we're trying to simplify, and it's going to make things more complicated. Now a candidate could get a matching grant from the city or, excuse me, a match or a grant, either or depending on the program if we moved forward with one. And I could still take in thousands of dollars from special interests. So I could do both. I don't love that. And then I could still raise as much money as I wanted to on a pack. And so those things don't jive to me. And then also, and I hate to put it this way, but I just some quick math. If we had done, let's just say we had done a match program in the last election. And half of the donations were available for a match. Then we would have spent over a quarter of a million dollars on people that aren't sitting here today. Just if 50% of those were match eligible. And I hate to use that as the example because it's certainly not a waste of money because the more people running the better ideas come out of the election and I think better people come out of the election. But I think going back to Councilmember Harding's point, I mean, we're giving money away to apply for a job that you're not going to get. There are going to be some people that don't get the job. And that just, that doesn't sit well with me. And so, you know, I was very lucky last year where I went on a post and a special election. There were four people in the primary. And you know, I worked my butt off in that election. And so I think I raised just about the same amount of money as my general election opponent. And I really think it had nothing to do with the money. I think I just worked harder. But you know I'm biased. So anyway I'm just I'm I'm glad we had this conversation. I was significantly more open to it coming into it today but just where I'm at at this point I think it was good to look at it but I think it just makes things more complicated and I would rather save the 1.1 million than go back out the door again. So that's where I'm at at this point, Chair. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. So there were a couple of concerns that I haven't touched upon yet that I had. You just mentioned the Super PAC issue. And the other thing, because this doesn't prevent Super PACs, the other thing that is outside groups helping candidates. So Brett, obviously outside groups could go and put their resources behind a candidate and help them. That doesn't stop it either. Yeah, those are outside the scope of a program like this. Right. So you can have candidates and tons of resources that put by outside groups to help candidates all the time. And so you have that, you have super hacks. And some of this, I mean, the outside who helps me helping sometimes you don't see in the numbers. And so that doesn't prevent any of that. But the other big concern I had and their issues is some of the enforcement problems on this issue. And the enforcement issue, meaning you're running a race and we have no investigatory powers, no police powers, no subpoena powers. You may do contract. They violate the contract. How do you enforce that? And then you have in the middle of race and the candidate wants to go ahead and accuse another candidate of not following that contract or doing something. And claiming violations are occurring. And what is our power, which we have none, to actually resolve that issue. And it could be politically charged and then you're bringing into city somehow. That is not resolved for me in any of this because the state program, they have enforcement methods. We have none and campaigns get ugly and people make accusations and ballot or not valid and now we're bringing in another way for someone to make an accusation against someone that could be unfounded and we have no way we've created this rule and then we have no way to do anything about it. And so that is extremely concerning to me about it. So I think this is a wonderful exercise, because I will tell you I had no idea. First of all, this is a lot of information, a lot of analysis. I thought it's a great conversation to have in terms of analysis and analyzing the choice we made. We made a choice and by the way, I think some of us were like, did we do the right thing after we had the vote of changing the election from odd years to even years? Because I'm pretty sure at some point, we didn't know how it was gonna turn out. And now we've seen an election happen. And frankly, it was extremely active. All the candidates in terms of all the races, you had a variety of people run those races. And three of those people that won the races are here today and some of them didn't even weren't didn't raise the most money in their race and so I'm trying to figure out what issue we're solving because the issue that was raised which was okay candidate have to spend more money, it's not necessarily, there's spending more money, it depends on the race you're running and who you're running against. And there's so many other factors, it's not, I spent more money in 2020, running for my 20, I'm 2021 running for that race. And so I spend 120 something thousand dollars. That's more than some people spend on the races this time around. And I think that had partly to do with my district. And every district is gonna be different because sometimes depending on the district and who's running, it's gonna be more expensive to run in in a district because you're going to have people that are probably going to be putting more resources or whatever candidate runs against you. So I think those are variables that affect also how much money you put in. Everything's getting more expensive. No question about it. And you're right. The things that are getting more expensive are, everything is getting more expensive. But when I look at the numbers and what people spend and I think of what I spent in 2021, I spent more than a lot of the people that ran in any of these races. And so for me, and am I going to spend more? I will tell you this, if I have to spend much more than when I spent, I'm not going to want to run. I mean, at one point, I'm going to be like, that's it. Like, I told my consultants last time, I'm not spending any more money. Because it's either people like you, or they don't, and money only gets you so far. So I said that then when I ran, I still believe it. I think the residents here know the people that are running in their district, and usually the top two are the people that kind of either get their message and also the people in those in those districts know because we have we don't have to reach a whole state a whole county and I think all of us probably got to know our district and our neighborhoods very well when we were running our races so council member given so much chair just speaking as the candidate who spent the least of my money to get you, I think it's important to note Councilman before that I certainly understand your intent with this new business item but just I don't know it as a fiscal conservative I find it difficult to spend taxpayer dollars on something like this especially when you take the chance of electing ideological extremists, folks who exacerbate political organizations and positions, it's a tough argument. But to everyone else's point, I mean, the way I got here was hard work. It was my skill set and it was merit. I ran against a candidate who was well-funded, outraged me, probably quadrupled. What I raised had the name recognition. And so it wasn't necessarily the connections, because he had twice as many, if it's not probably three times as many connections as I had, but I worked hard. I showed up. I did what he didn't do. And that's what got me here. I certainly don't want to handicap anyone, but I don't want to give anyone else any more of it vanished than what we had. We all had to work hard to get here. And I certainly think that's what we need to do is push hard work. I don't know. I think we have the focus on the broader issue here. And to me, this doesn't address that issue. It's about spending one. It's on camera. You know you should. I don't know, I think we have the focus on the broader issue here. And to me, this doesn't address that issue. It's about spending women's on camera. You should not have to spend $100,000 on a job that pays 60. It's the morality. And I certainly understand what you're trying to get to here, but we got to look at enforcement just like every other ordinance or law that we pass. How is it going to be enforced? Who's the burden that has to be borne here? I just it's tough. So right now I mean, I wouldn't mind having a deeper conversation, especially about how we're going to fund this. So I would support bringing it to Council. Councilmember Floyd? Yeah, I'll just wrap up in that. One, is I want to go back to like conversations around enforcement. Those enforcement conversations are applicable when we have spending limits and limits to, and limits as to what you can spend the funds on. And I would not support any of that because we don't have the enforcement mechanism. And the organizations that study this issue do not advise those limits because of the exact problems you described. The way that I think about this is the way that I think we think about a lot of things that happen at City Hall. We are, say it nicely severely limited in our legislative and regulatory powers because of state preemption. So we choose to do incentivization instead. You know we had a discussion about LDRs earlier today and we were talking about bonuses that we give if you do certain things, things like that. It's a similar conversation in that we're simply like using public money to encourage a certain behavior. So, you know, if you are saying you get a match for every small dollar donation, we're encouraging you to lean on small dollar donations instead of big money from outside organizations. It's that kind of idea that we're not able to regulate and that's why I brought something like this forward because if we're able to regulate, oh my God, I would be like no super packs, no outside organizations, individuals only, $100 donation limit, things like that. But we're not able to. So that's why I brought this forward because it's the next best alternative, which we've seen use a similar situation over and over again. I also brought it forward because I'm not speculating when I say the public supports a program like this. It's not speculation. Every precinct in this city supported the continuation of the state program. And so, you know, the argument that voters and the public are going to struggle with it holds no water. And then the only other thing I'd say is that the core problem is not something individual or unique to our city or the elections that take place in our city. The core problem is American democracy is bought and paid for by the highest bidder period. 96% of people who win elections in this country are the people who raise the most money. And so that's the, like, yes, this is not going to end that. This is not going to, and yeah, this is not going to be the end all be all to that problem. But it's the only step that we can take in that direction. And it's one that repeatedly the public shows is one of the top issues that we have. And this is the only way that we legally have to attack it. And that's why I proposed it. The only thing I would say going forward is I could spend some time figuring out exactly the contours of what's possible for us and then briefly present it later on, because I do think right now this is a really broad conversation, but I brought us a really broad conversation because I simply needed feedback in the sunshine. Like I can't get it any other way. And so I brought us a really broad conversation before I went down any rabbit holes to bring us something that we maybe spent a lot of time on. I can bring us something simple and say this is what I would recommend and you know we can get instant feedback but it might be that me and Brett sit down to do it and we feel like based off of today's feedback I'm going to rewatch this meeting later and read the minutes as well that we might not feel comfortable with that. So I'll leave it there for now but I've heard people loud and clear I think the hurdles are quite large so I'm not sure what that looks like but I'll spend some time working on it. Councilmember Fakesanders. Thank you. hopefully I don't forget hope at my points. The first one is to your example of we incentivize people all the time. Generally, the result of those incentives we got are a benefit from it. This, if we incentivize new candidates to run, if they lose, they lose. We get nothing from that. There's no return on that investment from that person, walking away. They were interested in running for office. I get it. But we don't get anything as a city. How we could benefit from this, and I want you to consider this, if we as a city, we contract it and make agreements with other organizations all the time. If there are individuals that want to run for office, they don't have a dollar to run for office. There's an incineration right there. You get yourself prepared, you know how we give grants and microphones and all this other kind of stuff that people that are actually ready to body in to move into the next step, or the next level. Well, if they need those desired entry funds to now be able to compare or to compete with others that are coming into the race, well, there you go. Because we do it all the time. We outside and counteract other organizations to prepare that candidate, or not candidates, because this is the first of the two. But you know those type of programs, consider doing that. That's just a thought, because I still have a problem with the taxpayers' dollars in us losing, because cheer girders, when you put it in dollar terms, that made a huge impact. But I already was not at that point. Well, I would say I would work for what I would do is love to hear it. And I'm not putting any more work on you, Britt. But I would love for you all to have a conversation to bring us a couple more options to consider. because again, I'm going back to my grassroots experience of having to start from round one and losing the possibility of, you know, just in case you all haven't realized it, we found a hard time finding people to actually rough off this. And I can only imagine the finances is one of those reasons. Not just finances, but they got to be qualified too. We need people. But I would love to see if there are some options that we could work to help incentivize some of those that would love to run for office. And they need help. And I'm not saying I help. I'm saying assistance to get to that next level because we need those in this political arena and like you said not the ones that were bought by the highest dollars because I've seen it just because you raised the most money just not here to you. Council, advice to your head and also to the absolute correct issue of connection in that area that you're running in. So I would ask that we continue this conversation after you all have had it because I'm not going to say no because I would love to see how we can assist in a way. So I'll leave that request there. Thank you, Chair. Thank you. Chair Gertis and then Councilmember Gillen. Thank you, Madam Chair. Trying to find a middle ground where I'm okay having a further discussion. I wanted to provide my feedback if you were going to go do that. I would have no program in the primary. And so no funding whatsoever come from the city in the primary. And it would be a cap and it would be a small. I mean, I say small. $25,000 to $50,000 in the general election. I'm open to that conversation. I still don't like spending the money. But when I think about the most you're going to have is four, maybe five if you had a special. And then five if you had the mayor. When I think about 1.1 million of savings and you're spending 250, I'm open to the conversation, but I'm not open to it in the primary, in the district, because frankly, I don't think how much money you raise in the primary matters. It's knocking on doors. And so, and I know we maybe have a fundamental difference on that, and I'm okay with it, but I just, I wouldn't be comfortable in a six person primary, having half the match come in the primary and then half the match coming later, or whatever we decided to do, I'm just not comfortable with it. So, in the spirit of trying to find a path to a middle ground, that would be my feedback. So, thanks Madam Chair. Here, Council Member Gevens. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, nourdis, actually. You raised a good point. There is a unique wrinkle to our electoral system in St. Petersburg that I don't personally like. You know, the citywide general election after the district election. And you know, my problem with it is you get a year to introduce yourself to the district, which is a lot easier by knocking on doors. And then you have 10 weeks, well, five weeks before mail ballots come out to introduce yourself to a group of population 10 times the size of the city. You make a very good point. I personally like to have knocked on 10,000 doors in this city and is a very difficult situation and you get no time to do that in the general election. So you do present a very interesting perspective there. And I'll just take that in mind. Yeah, that's all I say, I appreciate it. And council member Fig Sanders as well, he presented a very interesting idea. Also, this is the kind of feedback I was hoping to solicit from this conversation. Yeah, and it's funny because Chair Gurd has said that and I was hoping to solicit from this conversation. Yeah, and it's funny because Shere Gurd has said that and I was thinking to myself because when I was talking in terms of our districts when we're running, I don't think there is an issue in our districts and I think people need to know you. And if you decide to run for office one day and you hadn't done anything in your district, that's on you. Like I just, okay, I want to win for office, but I think people should be engaged. It's not just that year that you're running. I think a lot of us and a lot of people end up there through a long process, and that involves some community engagement in whatever forms that may end up being in your community. So that's where I'm like in the district. When I see people running, you know the people that have been there and have worked it and are part of the district and the general is much more difficult, obviously, to get your name out. So I agree with that. So it'll be interesting to see what you come up with, but I just wanted to kind of add to that in terms of the running for your primary and your district, how I felt about that to general does have its well-reached. Okay. Well this has been a wonderful conversation. Yes. So two points briefly. One just generally on Councilmember Figg Sanders on your suggestion to leverage outside organizations, the problem with that in this context is that contribution limit that I talked about. We can give money directly to people because we're not a person under campaign finance law. The moment an external group starts getting involved, they are a person and they can give no more than $1,000 to an individual candidate, whether it's direct cash or even in-kind support. So that's where you can start to run into. We'll look at it, but I just wanted to manage expectations on that. And just for the record, the chair, our girls was being very, very generous when he said $25,000. because initially I would think a high number to get someone started, that wouldn't have been my recommendation. So I was still like to see what the donation limits could be even in that case, because if they're starting, they're doing just that. They're starting. They're getting financial support. So I didn't give a dollar amount. And the other thing is in the interest of keeping this at a high level What we bring back for further discussion could be if the committee is open to it Not full blown legislation with all of like the super precise making sure the commas in the right place And it more of a conceptual model to look at which would make it a little bit easier potentially to digest several options. So I'm happy to work with Council Member Floyd on that and I'm happy to do the work. I'm here to do the work. Thank you. Thank you. Well, Attorney Petagrute, like always you've given us a lot of food for thought in your memo and councilmember Floyd. You have as well in terms of this issue based on a decision that City Council made to change the elections. I'm glad that we are having this conversation and we'll continue this conversation. Like we're continuing the other conversation on appointments. And if there is nothing else from the committee or anyone else, our meeting is adjourned. Thank you, everyone. Thank you. 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