Last week I took a closer look at the campaign finance reports for Mayoral candidates. Let’s do the same for the Controller candidates.
Candidate Raised In Kind Spent Loans On Hand
==========================================================
Robinson 46,170 3,908 33,908 0 5,033
Brown 267,750 3,547 20,818 0 222,858
Frazer 128,097 1,009 120,956 32,500 53,973
Jefferson 8,653 2,943 9,255 1,860 5,521
Boney 8,390 0 5,487 0 2,902
Candidate PAC Max Non-Hou PAC % Max % Non-Hou %
==================================================================
Robinson 8,500 10,000 17,000 18.4% 21.7% 36.8%
Brown 2,500 140,000 42,450 0.9% 52.3% 15.6%
Frazer 10,350 15,000 7,400 8.1% 11.7% 5.8%
Jefferson 1,000 0 2,100 11.6% 0.0% 24.3%
Boney 1,500 0 3,795 17.9% 0.0% 45.2%
Candidate Overhead Outreach
===============================
Robinson 1,750 28,889
Brown 10,535 1,923
Frazer 86,040 7,028
Jefferson 5,910 1,682
Boney 1,200 254
As always, all reports can be seen here. To review, PAC money is anything given by a PAC or business – basically, donations not from individuals – “Max” is the sum of donations from people who gave $5K and PACs who gave $10K (I didn’t see any of the latter on these reports), and “Non-Hou” sums up the contributions given from people who don’t have a “Houston TX” address. That was a bit more challenging in the case of Carroll Robinson, since he annoyingly only listed the state and ZIP code for his donors, but I managed. On the spending side, “Overhead” was initially intended to be the sum of money paid for items listed as “Consulting”, “Salaries/Wages/Contract labor” and payroll taxes, but as is often the case with these reports things got a little messy. Frazer had a bunch of payments to Mammoth Marketing Group that including things like Consulting Expense, Solicitation/Fundraising Expense, and Office Overhead/Rental Expense, which was for website design and maintenance. I included all of that, but listed expenses for Printing under Outreach, which is intended for advertising, mailers, yard signs, and the like. Frazer was also the only candidate to list rent for office space as an expense, so I included that under Overhead as well. Like I said, it got a bit messy.
The topline dollar figures speak for themselves. The spending is of more interest to me. Here’s a look at some of the items that caught my eye for each candidate.
Carroll Robinson – $29,200 of the money he spent went to Patriot Strategies Group, for the following items:
$1,000 for consulting fees
$8,500 for Auto Calls
$2,200 for Internet or Online Ads
$4,500 for Mailing
$9,500 for Auto Calls & Mail
$2,000 for Video Production & E-Blast
$1,000 for Social Media & Video Production
$500 for Social Media
Everything above is listed as Outreach except for the first charge. I don’t know why Auto Calls and Mail are lumped together on one item when they are separate on others, but like I said, this can get messy. $8,500 plus sounds a lot to me for robocalls, especially this early in a campaign.
Chris Brown didn’t actually spent that much – I expect that will come later – but one of his larger expenditures was $4,489 to Piryx for “online donation fees”. Piryx handles a lot of this sort of transaction = you’ll see their name on a lot of finance reports – but usually you see charges in the one to two dollar range. I have no explanation for this, unless maybe they take a cut of each donation and a bunch of those max contributions were made online.
Bill Frazer spent $22,825 from personal funds, with $6,077 in “unpaid incurred obligations”. As with Bill King, I think that burn rate could come back to haunt him.
Dwight Jefferson – All $2,963 in kind was from Coats Rose PAC for an Event Expense. On a somewhat odd note, the Andrews & Kurth PAC gave $1,500 to every candidate in this race except Jefferson, who got $1,000. I think if I were Dwight Jefferson, I’d ask them to make it up to me.
Jew Don Boney had a lot of food-related expenses listed as Solicitation/Fundraising Expense. There’s not much more of interest than that.
So that’s the Controller reports. I’ll try to see about doing the same with the Council reports.