Some Clean candidates still using PACs

AUGUSTA – It has become common practice for legislative leaders to use political action committees to advance their party’s candidates and activities even as they use the state’s Clean Election Act to finance their own political races.

Nine of the 10 incoming legislative leaders in both parties have their own PACs or help run others, according to a Maine Sunday Telegram report. And eight of those leaders used Clean Election funding to win their seats in the Legislature, at taxpayers’ expense.

An analysis by the newspaper found that Democratic and Republican leaders in the new Legislature run or partly control 14 PACs that raised more than $1.5 million this year.

Senate President Beth Edmonds, a Freeport Democrat, has ties to three PACs that together raised a total of more than $450,000 through late October from State House lobbyists, Maine hospitals, trial lawyers, bankers, oil dealers and union members, among others.

Much of that money was used to help other Democratic candidates get elected.

“I have to say to people [that] I understand this looks funny,” Edmonds said.

The Maine Commission on Governmental Ethics and Election Practices will hold a meeting Dec. 12 in part to get the public’s thoughts on whether changes are needed. Any proposed changes in the Clean Election Act would be forwarded to the Legislature.

Typically, legislative leaders who have PACs use them to help colleagues get elected by giving money directly to privately funded candidates or by spending it independently on behalf of publicly funded candidates who cannot legally accept direct contributions.

Such “independent expenditures” include mailings, handouts, fliers and other promotional materials that the PACs buy to promote individual candidates or a slate of party candidates.

The practice raises questions about compliance with the intent of the first-in-the-nation Clean Election Act, which was adopted by voters in 1996 to get special-interest money out of politics. The law went into effect in 2000.

They include Edmonds, presumptive Democratic House Speaker Glenn Cummings of Portland and Senate Minority Leader Carol Weston, R-Montville.

The biggest of those PACs were the House Republican Fund, which raised more than $438,000; the Senate Democratic Campaign Committee, which pulled in more than $381,000; and the Maine Senate Republican Victory Fund, at about $368,000, the newspaper said.