nothin At Last Minute, Those Benjamins Were Flying | New Haven Independent

At Last Minute, Those Benjamins Were Flying

Thomas MacMillan Photo

As he raced toward a deadline to qualify for public campaign money — and thus keep his campaign for secretary of the state alive — Gerry Garcia ended up with piles of hundred-dollar bills.

Garcia (pictured in top photo at May’s state Democratic convention), the only New Havener seeking statewide office this year, just made a 5 p.m. deadline last Friday to submit an application to the Citizen Election Program (CEP) to receive $375,000 in public dollars for his campaign for the Democratic nomination for secretary of the state. To get the money he had to show he raised $75,000 in contributions of $100 or less.

Garcia’s opponent in the Aug. 10 Democratic primary, Denise Merrill, had already qualified for the public money. Garcia needs the public money to compete in the primary.

The State Elections Enforcement Commission (SEEC) will consider Garcia’s application at 1 p.m. Thursday. The SEEC’s Audit Commission has been reviewing Garcia’s paperwork — and wading through an unusually high percentage of reported cash donations, rather than donations made by checks or credit card.

The public financing issue takes on special resonance in the race for secretary of the state, since that position is Connecticut’s top elections official.

As Garcia sped toward last Friday’s finish line, his filing reveals, he collected dozens of contributions from schoolteachers and administrators and other government employees in New Haven and Bridgeport, whose mayors and political machinery are backing his campaign, and who vowed to help with a last-minute surge. Read the filing here.

The filing covers just a two-week period, ending July 15. In that time Garcia also collected over 300 cash donations. Several of the cash donors listed their occupations as unemployed. Close to 200 of the cash donations were for the maximum of $100.

Capitol blogger and political columnist Kevin Rennie suggested in a posting that the last-minute flood of cash contributions raised eyebrows at the SEEC and delayed approval of Garcia’s public money. He called it the sort of trend in a report that raises the suspicions of agency auditors.”

However, SEEC spokeswoman Nancy Nicolescu said the agency has been proceeding with the Garcia application the way it does with all public-financing requests: scrutinizing every reported contribution, including signed certified forms from contributions that must accompany all cash donations.

She called it common for inner-city” state legislative campaigns to produce a higher percentage of cash donations.

Garcia echoed that theme.

You’ll notice a lot of the contributions came from the minority community,” Garcia said in a conversation late Wednesday. A lot of us don’t have checking accounts.”

Many other cash contributions came from Caucasian lawyers, architects, and political professionals. In those cases, Garcia said, the campaign wanted to avoid last-minute technical problems. Accepting cash was easier than taking, say, checks that might turn out to be invalid because they came from a donor’s business account rather than his or her personal account, as required by law.

The deal is very simple. When we were collecting checks from people, in the interest of time, we were asking people to get us the contributions as quickly as possibly,” Garcia said. Sometimes we were finding mistakes made [previously]. There’s nothing more special than that.”

This is the second state election year in which candidates can qualify for public money under the CEP, and the first covering statewide races.

In 2008, the SEEC did reject a candidate’s application because of questions about cash donations. It found that the brother of state representative campaign of Samuel Cusano of Rocky Hill put in $1,100 of his own money, then collecting forms claiming that 11 other individuals had donated $100 each. Read that ruling here.

Paul Bass Photo

Merrill (pictured), Garcia’s opponent, reported receiving 34 cash donations in her most recent report. Two of those were for $100.

Overall she has reported 53 cash donations totaling just $1,094 since the campaign began, according to spokeswoman Patty McQueen.

Merrill hesitated on Wednesday to raise questions about Garcia’s cash contributions or cast any aspersions. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with taking cash,” she said. She noted that candidates’ claims are there for everyone to see. If there’s a problem, I hope the SEEC will look into it.” She added that she wasn’t saying that a problem exists.

Thomas MacMillan helped report this story.

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