Oakland News: Mayor Quan’s Campaign Debt Problem

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Oakland Mayor Jean Quan is just one month away from officially being replaced by current Mayor-Elect Libby Schaaf. Quan became the first Oakland Mayor to lose a relection contest since 1990, when Lionel Wilson lost to Elihu Harris. But in fairness to the late Mayor Wilson, that would have been his fourth term as Oakland Mayor had he won, where Quan was battling for a second term.

Looking back in history, Jean Quan is Oakland’s first woman and first Asian Mayor, but she has scored another first because of her loss: Quan’s the first Mayor to be defeated in running for a second term since Oaklanders started selecting their leaders by popular vote with Franklin Mott (known as “the Man Who Built Oakland”) in 1905. Prior to Mayor Quan, former Congressman and Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums avoided running for a second term; now California Governor Jerry Brown, Elihu Harris, Lionel Wilson, John Reading, John Houlihan, Clifford Rishell, and (separated by a period where the City Council selected the Mayor) John Davie and Mott all won reelection more than once.

(Blog post continued after Quan’s Form 460, here..)

Oakland Mayor Quan Final Campaign Finance Report 2014 by Zennie Abraham

Thus Quan enters uncharted Oakland political territory, and does so with a campaign debt so substantial, friends have called me with stories of how she’s passing the hat, asking for help: $700 here, and then asking for that person to call ten of their friends and get $700 more, each. Her objective is to clear a campaign debt of $80,000 (according to the final Form 460 she filed, Mayor Quan took out an $80,000 loan) and replace additional contributions she made to her campaign totaling $32,000 – when the shortfall of contributions to expenditures is considered, or $5,661, that’s $117,661.

The good news for Mayor Quan is that she can point to cash remaining of $84,564, so the net is $33,097. You will say ‘Wait. Quan made those additional $32,000 in contributions to her own campaign but why count them if she’s not declared them as a loan – that leaves her with $116,564, or just $597 down!’ The simple answer comes from the fact that she’s passing the hat as of this writing, which means she needs the money, which means that amounts she gave as a contribution on 10/31/2014 and 10/29/2014 before that looks like they should have been listed as a loan, but were not.

So here we come to Quan’s problem of retiring her campaign debt after a loss. The bigger problem for Jean is that she and her staff were not known for their money-raising prowess after she won the Oakland Mayor’s Race in 2010. Plus, there are friends who tell me that she still has campaign debt left over from the recall election battle of 2011.

I checked that, and at face, it appears Quan raised and spent enough money not to have a substantial negative cash balance. But a closer look at the contributions list during that recall election battle shows that Mayor Quan’s husband Floyd Huen put in a total of 28,435 himself. So, assuming that debt’s still outstanding, we have that added to the $32,000, or $60,435.

Help Mayor Quan Retire Her Debt

The bottom line is this: regardless of how we may feel about the job Mayor Quan did as the elected leader of our city, she at least deserves our respect as one who served our city, by our pitching in to help her clear up her problem. Yes, I did write that.

My feeling is a continuation of a philosophy I maintained while she was Mayor, and have sustained while she has been in this lame duck position: the person elected to serve our great city must be the recipient of our respect and assistance. She is a standing member of what I call ‘The Oakland Family’ and that’s a term I just coined to describe a group of people who care enough about our city to run for office in it, or be involved in trying to improve it in some way. The Oakland Family consists of many people who don’t always get along with each other (like Grand Lake Theater Owner Allan Michaan and Mayor Quan, for example), some who have passed on (like Sanjiv Handa and former County Council Richard Winnie),and some who went to work in other cities but still cast a long shadow (like Alameda City Manager John Russo (who was Oakland’s first elected and three term City Attorney) but who are all pulling in the same general direction that adds up to civic improvement. We spend very little time celebrating our family – maybe its time we started to.

Mayor Quan needs our help. With that, I have an idea: a simple event I call “Celebrate Oakland’s Family”. I’m not going to try and produce the damn thing, but I’m just throwing the idea out there. It would be an evening to reward people who have made contributions to Oakland large and small.

Part of it would help Mayor Quan with her debt problem, the other part of it would go for whatever charity the planning committee thinks is appropriate.

Someone might say “She lost, let her deal with it.” But I personally don’t think anyone who served as Mayor of Oakland should go broke because they did so. In doing my research, no other former Mayor of Oakland has been in this situation before. It just doesn’t feel right that Quan, or anyone in the future, should go through this problem. Does it mean we take care of councilmembers who lost re-election bids? No. It doesn’t.

Being Mayor of Oakland is something only couple of handfuls of people have had the privilege to be over our city’s history. The Mayor represents all of Oakland and becomes a true veteran of politics here. That’s something to celebrate and to admire, win or lose, and something that we’ve never done before.

Think about it. When was the last time we had one event where Oakland Mayors Quan, Dellums, Brown and Harris, were all at, at once?

Time for a change.

Stay tuned.

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