Wichita may get meaningful campaign finance reform after all | Opinion

About two weeks ago, I predicted that campaign-finance reform passed by the outgoing Wichita City Council wouldn’t last long.

And I was right.

But we may get something as good, possibly better.

To recap, the outgoing council at its last meeting, led by now-former Mayor Brandon Whipple, overturned a 2015 council decision that let corporations and limited liability companies contribute to City Council campaigns. Before 2015, only individuals could contribute.

At last Tuesday’s meeting, the first for the new council, incoming member Dalton Glasscock asked that the matter be put on the agenda for a reversal vote.

Since then, there’s been more than a little online chatter about the new council’s first initiative being to protect its campaign donors.

A typical comment was this one from Celeste Racette, the leader of Save Century II who placed fourth in the mayoral vote behind Lily Wu, Whipple and then-Council member Bryan Frye: “NO WAY! It took 4 years to finally see someone shut the money floodgates that had been opened . . . Please join me next Tuesday to speak against this horrendous action. Why is campaign money first in priorities? So disappointing.”

There’s been more attention on this than usual because the new mayor, Wu, swept into office after a record-shattering $630,000 campaign. It included huge support from Wichita’s business elite, many of whom used stacked contributions from multiple LLCs to circumvent and far exceed a purported $500 limit on contributions.

As I said in my earlier column, problems with business donations include:

▪ One, wealthy business people in Wichita can have dozens of LLCs to launder campaign contributions through. Many create them for every business and property they have, sometimes even for individual floors within the same building.

▪ Two, it’s excruciatingly difficult to find out who owns all these LLCs. The information is filed with the office of the Kansas Secretary of State, but its website is cumbersome. In a lot of cases, LLCs are owned by other LLCs and it takes searching document after document, company by company, to find the real owners.

The Eagle made a database of who gave what to whom in the mayor race and it took almost a week of reporter time — far beyond the capability of the average voter to track down.

But here’s the good news:

I spoke with Glasscock on Friday and he was open to a suggestion I made in my column that the way to improve our elections is not so much trying to limit the contributions — rich people will always find a way around that — but in requiring that the business owners put their human names on campaign donations from their companies.

I think Glasscock understands the value of that kind of transparency.

In 2019, three of his fellow Republicans tried to make him the fall guy for a false and vicious attack ad targeting Whipple, which they had launched from the anonymity of a shell LLC.

It took months of our reporting, a lawsuit filed by Whipple, and release of a conversation secretly recorded by an insider to the plot to clear Glasscock’s name — and prove that the masterminds behind the smear campaign were former state Rep. Michael Capps, former Sedgwick County Commissioner Michael O’Donnell and former Wichita City Council member James Clendenin.

Glasscock said he plans to introduce an amendment Tuesday to require businesses that contribute to campaigns to disclose their primary owner or representative.

Good idea, might need a couple tweaks.

For LLCs, I’d suggest they be required to disclose members who own more than 5% of the company. That would likely make the ordinance legally bulletproof, because it’s the exact same information they already have to give the secretary of state.

A representative from political-contributing businesses should suffice for publicly traded corporations owned by stockholders.

But letting LLCs use a representative as their campaign face could be too big of a loophole. The actual contributors could hide behind an obscure employee or even an outside firm acting as their “registered agent.” That was a major hurdle in untangling the Capps/O’Donnell/Clendenin conspiracy.

But if it’s done right, and is supported by the remaining members of the old council who voted to ban business contributions — Brandon Johnson, Mike Hoheisel and Maggie Ballard — it’s a done deal.

And we might get some lasting and meaningful campaign reform — even if it’s not exactly as they originally envisioned it.