‘It’s bizarre’: Candidate paid for a manager and mailers. Why didn’t he report it?

Looking at the campaign finance reports filed by recent Bay Harbor Islands town council candidate Roger Santana, you wouldn’t know he ran much of a campaign at all.

Back in March, Santana reported loaning $3,250 to his own campaign, then paying that money to himself for the stated purpose of “campaign mgr.” Then, for 10 straight reporting periods leading up to the Aug. 18 election, Santana filed waivers indicating that no money had come into or out of his campaign.

But those reports weren’t all accurate. Santana, who serves on Bay Harbor Islands’ planning and zoning board and lost the council election to two incumbents Tuesday, didn’t act as his own campaign manager, but rather paid a consultant at Diaz Campaigns to manage his run for council. A March 10 invoice from Diaz Campaigns shows $3,250 in costs for mailers and consulting work, but those payments weren’t itemized on Santana’s campaign treasurer reports, as is required.

Santana told the Miami Herald he provided the invoice to the town clerk, but the clerk, Alba Chang, said in an email Friday that “no invoices were submitted to our office.”

In late March, Chang emailed Santana saying she had flagged issues with his first campaign report and told him to provide an itemized list of expenditures. In response, Santana expressed confusion and asked Chang to write in “whatever is wrong or missing” on the report herself. “I can’t stand these reports!!!!” Santana wrote.

When Chang said she couldn’t write in the information for him and directed him to documents on proper filing practices, Santana replied that he wasn’t feeling well and again asked Chang to make the corrections. “I really don’t want to stress much over this,” he wrote.

The town election was originally set for April 7 but pushed back to August due to COVID-19. As election day approached in July, Santana spent additional money to promote his campaign. A July 25 invoice from Diaz Campaigns shows $965 was spent on 500 mail pieces, 2,500 “walking cards” and robocalls to local voters. Santana says he paid Diaz Campaigns to cover those costs.

But none of that was included in Santana’s campaign finance reports, either.

Asked to explain, Santana said he plans to report the expenses on his termination report, which candidates must file to disclose the disposal of any excess campaign funds within 90 days of an election. Termination reports aren’t typically used to report activity during the campaign.

The exception, experts say, is if a candidate makes a payment after the election to cover work that was done at an earlier date. But Santana told the Miami Herald he paid Diaz Campaigns before filing his final pre-election report on Aug. 14, which indicated no financial activity.

“If it is a mistake or not, I don’t know,” Santana said Thursday. “I know we have the termination report and that’s where I’m gonna be declaring this.” Told that termination reports aren’t intended for that purpose, Santana wrote in a text message: “I just wasn’t aware of it...”

The town clerk said Friday that Santana contacted her and “suggested he will [be] amending a report.”

Juan-Carlos “J.C.” Planas, a Miami elections attorney who advised the recent Miami-Dade County mayoral campaign of Alex Penelas, said he was “at a loss” to explain Santana’s reports. While questions about possible unreported campaign spending are fairly common, Planas said, those usually involve “shady consultants” or the commingling of funds between political committees and candidates.

There’s no evidence of the sort in this case, in which Santana says he alone covered the approximately $4,000 cost to operate his “low profile” campaign.

“It’s such little money, it’s bizarre,” Planas said.

The issues appear to be twofold. First, Santana didn’t report the payments he says he made to his campaign consultant for their work and for the cost of campaign advertising. Second, his reports don’t disclose that he received any contributions, either from himself or outside donors, to cover the cost of the ads in July.

“If there’s no money [in the account], you can’t spend it. It’s kind of that simple,” said Joe Geller, a state representative and attorney who specializes in election law, after the circumstances were described to him by a Herald reporter. “It appears to me that these are some pretty serious violations of campaign finance law.”

There was no immediate indication that Santana, who previously ran for town council in 2017 and came up 21 votes short, intentionally flouted the rules. But Geller and Planas said the circumstances seem to point to, at best, a lack of understanding.

Willfully certifying a false campaign report is a first-degree misdemeanor in Florida, but criminal charges are very rare — in part because it’s hard to prove intent. The most recent local example, according to Planas, involved then-state Senator Alex Diaz de la Portilla, now a Miami commissioner, getting charged with over 200 counts of omitting contributions from his campaign finance reports in 1999. A jury acquitted him in 2002.

More often, such violations may result in civil penalties from the Florida Elections Commission if the commission receives a complaint.

Regardless, Geller said, candidates should know the rules and be transparent about their finances.

“Campaign violations are serious, they’re important,” he said. “It behooves [candidates] to at least make some minimal effort to understand the campaign finance system.”

Stephanie Fresneda, the campaign manager for Santana, confirmed that Santana paid Diaz Campaigns through his campaign account, but said she wasn’t at all involved in preparing his financial reports. Santana acted as his own campaign treasurer, as he had previously in 2017, when he ran for council on a slate with now-mayor Stephanie Bruder and publicly reported receiving thousands of dollars in outside contributions.

This time around, Santana ran a quieter campaign and got 18% of votes — or 256 of 1,448 votes cast in the small town north of Miami Beach — finishing behind incumbents Joshua Fuller (40%) and Elizabeth Tricoche (42%).