New light shed on campaign funding

New light shed on campaign funding
Cash-on-hand figures disclosed for first time in reports Thursday


11:10 PM CST on Thursday, January 15, 2004

By PETE SLOVER / The Dallas Morning News


AUSTIN – A new era of see-through political pocketbooks dawned Thursday in Texas, for the first time letting the public – and potential rivals – measure the cash in officeholders' tills.

A change in the state's ethics laws this year requires public officials to report not only contribution and spending but also cash on hand, a figure that could previously only have been derived by messy and complex research.

Fred Lewis, director of an Austin-based group that studies money in politics, was among those who pushed for the cash-on-hand provision. He said the main benefit to the public is to make the relationship between politics and money more transparent.

But, he added, the new rules are bound to affect the political process as competing candidates scope out their rivals' finances in heretofore-unavailable ways.
"Its inevitable that the candidates, the parties, the pundits, everybody will look at the war chests of incumbents," he said, predicting that the reports will show that campaigns are needlessly stockpiling cash. "You never knew before that they had no need to raise the money, because they have plenty of money already."

The first such reports, due Thursday, showed that Gov. Rick Perry out-fund-raised Comptroller Carole Strayhorn, a potential Republican primary opponent in 2006, by almost 3-to-1. He brought in about $4 million compared with her proceeds of nearly $1.4 million during the last six months of 2003.
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