Sacramento mayor directed old campaign money to disgraced L.A. councilman | Opinion

Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg has given disgraced Los Angeles City Councilman Kevin de León the maximum amount of money in campaign donations for the upcoming primary election — $900 — out of his own campaign fund from the 2020 mayoral election. He’ll be eligible to give de León an additional $900 should the L.A. councilman make it to the general election.

Should he? Most certainly not.

Opinion

De León and Steinberg have long been close colleagues, with de León assuming Steinberg’s role as Senate president pro tem back in 2014. De León also assisted the Sacramento mayor with his No Place Like Home Initiative, which set aside $2 billion for housing for the homeless and funded projects across the state, including in Sacramento.

But that relationship should have radically changed one year ago, when a racist tape recording of several Los Angeles City Council members, including de León, was leaked.

This tape recording was of a private and brutal exchange among the Latino political elite in Los Angeles. De León, City Council President Nury Martinez, Los Angeles County Federation of Labor President Ron Herrera and City Councilman Gil Cedillo can be heard verbally attacking Black and gay people with political power. De León was not the most vocal in the room, but he did nothing to stop the terrible conversation. Now, he and Cedillo are suing to find out who it was that unlawfully taped and then leaked their words.

Of the four people recorded, Martinez and Herrera eventually resigned from their positions, but Cedillo and de León did not, despite mounting calls — including from President Joe Biden — for them to do so. They were both stripped of their committee assignments and chairmanships and were formally censured. Cedillo left the council last December when his term ended.

Meanwhile, de León has stubbornly announced his candidacy for another term on the L.A. City Council. According to the L.A. Times, he raised a staggering $117,285 for that campaign in just 10 days, according to quarterly financial filings. So it’s not as if he needs Steinberg’s campaign money.

Among de León’s financial supporters were Cedillo and Herrera — not a great crowd to have our mayor’s name lumped in with.

If and when the option to donate more money to de León becomes available to Steinberg in the general election, he should decline any further financial aid for moral reasons. But if he can’t help himself, he should, at the very least, refrain from using old campaign funds to do so.

Those funds were given to Steinberg by supporters with the intent of bettering the Sacramento region, yet Steinberg made a jarring judgment call to use that money in support of a tarnished candidate running in Los Angeles, hundreds of miles away from here. Nobody who gave him that money did so with de León in mind.

Moreover, as a savvy political player, Steinberg should have known better than to tie his name — financially or otherwise — to de León, regardless of how far back their friendship goes. De León may have support in his own district (voters there see him as the least culpable of the recorded quartet, and he is representative of working-class Spanish speakers within the district), but his reputation in the rest of the state is forever tainted.

After the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, there are simply some scandals that politicians will never be able to move on from, and this tape may very well be one of them. That Steinberg is not prepared to answer questions about this donation is telling. His office was not willing to go on the record when asked, but did confirm the donation.

If there was money left over in the war chest, Steinberg should have donated it to a Sacramento-based candidate or even a Sacramento-based charity. While atypical of most politicians with a war chest full of old campaign funds, any of these options would have kept the money here in Sacramento. The least he could have done is honor the intent of those donations, and directed the money toward something local.

De León is welcome to try and salvage his political career in Los Angeles. No one deserves to be punished forever. But Steinberg clearly knew this was either bad politics or bad optics — or both — which is why he took a pass on talking about it.

Steinberg has already announced his candidacy for California Attorney General in 2030; of all constitutional offices, that’s the one that requires its holder to make countless judgment calls on the right thing to do for further justice. This particular judgment call by Steinberg should not go forgotten in the interim months.

Simply put: If the mayor wants to contribute to his old friend’s campaign, he needs to dig into his own pocket.