A closer look at finance reports: Spending on consultants

Now that we’ve looked at who gives to candidates in Houston, let’s take a look at what those candidates spend their money on. Broadly speaking, your main forms of expenditures include overhead (rent, food, office supplies, transportation, webhosting, etc), advertising, field work, outreach, and professional services. It’s the latter that I’ll be examining today. By “professional services”, I mean political consultants and other people whose labor is paid for with campaign funds. Here’s my Google spreadsheet with the data, sorted by candidate and by payee. Some notes:

– Generally speaking, I listed anything on the Schedule F (political expenditures from campaign funds) and Schedule G (political expenditures from personal funds) for which the category was either “Consulting” or “Salaries and Wages”. I say “generally” because not everyone fills out these forms in the same way. There’s some overlap between consulting fees and other things like advertising, event, and web design expenses. I tried, but I make no claim to absolute consistency on any of this, and as before I may have just missed some stuff.

– As previously mentioned, a couple of candidates listed campaign consultant expenses as in-kind donations. These are noted by asterisks next to the consultants’ names. CM Bradford in At Large #4 and Bryan Smart in District B are the two examples of this.

– Remember that this report covers six months. Many of the consulting expenses listed are spread out over the full six months, with the consultant or other professional being paid a flat rate. I listed everything as one sum per payee, so if there are any arithmetic errors the fault is mine and not the candidates’.

– I was moderately surprised that only a handful of consultants or firms had multiple clients for the cycle. I guess I thought the universe of political professionals was a little smaller than that. Be that as it may, only Lone Star Strategies (Cohen, Gonzalez, Jones, Ronald Green); Net Victories (Cohen, Gonzalez, Noriega); Burt Levine (Dick, Ronald Green); and Blakemore & Associates (Sullivan, Hoang) were employed by more than one campaign.

– On the other hand, many campaigns paid money to multiple outfits, led by Eric Dick in At Large #2, for whom I’ve listed ten people that received payments from his campaign. I believe there were a couple more, but they got less than $100 each, so I omitted them. Cohen, Cweren, and Costello each listed seven payees.

– As before, I did not include Mayor Parker’s campaign, because I still don’t have the time or the desire to slog through the nearly 900 pages of her report. I know Sue Davis, who did some work for CM Costello’s campaign, works for the Mayor’s as well, but off the top of my head I don’t know of other overlap. Maybe I’ll get back to this later.

That’s about all I’ve got for this. Every cycle there’s a tempest in an inside-baseball teapot over Dem candidates employing Republican operatives and vice versa, but I didn’t see anything peculiar in this data. If you see something I’ve missed, let me know.

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2 Responses to A closer look at finance reports: Spending on consultants

  1. Jeff Benson says:

    According to this, Brad Pritchett who is the Vice Pres of HSYD, is on Cohen’s payroll. I suppose it isn’t surprising that she got their endorsement. That’s pretty awful for a candidate who claims to want transparency. Looks bad for the organization too.

  2. Erik Vidor says:

    Nice try Jeff but Brad was paid a total of $700 for “website consulting”, once for $650 and another for $50. I wouldn’t exactly call that being on the “payroll”.

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