Destroying the candidates’ paper trail

Ever wonder if your local elected official is being influenced by contributions from special interests?

I do. But then, I live in Portland, where the governor’s brother, Bob Baldacci, and his fellow real estate developers helped defeat the mayor (who was opposed to their $100-plus million project to “rescue” a city-owned pier), filling his seat on the city council with their own paid “community organizer,” Dory Waxman.

How do I know that? Because under Maine law, Waxman had to file a campaign finance disclosure detailing who underwrote her bid for office, just as every other candidate for office in the 13 Maine municipalities with a population greater than 15,000 has to. A quick trip down to City Hall and anyone can learn that Baldacci gave the maximum $250 donation to Waxman, as did his partners in the venture, Thomas Varley and Patrick Walsh, Varley’s housemate Heidi Walsh, their in-house accountant, Robert Garcia, and their attorney and spokesman, Harold Pachios.

Baldacci and these or other associates also gave money to the new mayor, Jill Duson, and city councilor Dan Skolnik. Maybe that’s why, when other councilors suggested Waxman should recuse herself from votes pertaining to her former patrons, Duson and Skolnik backed her up. Maybe the money didn’t influence their opinions, but you’ll probably never know the whole story of the relationships between councilors and donors. That’s because all records prior to 2006 have been destroyed.

Yes, destroyed: the paper copies at City Hall shredded and anything that was up on the city website taken down. City Clerk Linda Cohen intended to destroy the 2006 ones as well, but is reconsidering as a result of my inquiries for this story.

But wait, there’s more: all the other large towns and cities are doing the same thing, all on the advice of state officials. Bangor city clerk Patti Dubois tells me she’s eliminated all records prior to 2004. Nine months ago, Augusta had possession of all records back to 1978, according to city clerk Barbara Wardwell, but now nothing remains before 2004.

“I’m an administrator and I have to systematically clean out our files and that’s how this has always been done under the rules that the state of Maine has handed down to us,” Cohen explained, adding that she has been doing this for the past twenty years. “If somebody comes in to look at a record we should have destroyed already, we would have violated the rules.”

How can that be? After, all the whole purpose of campaign finance disclosures is to allow the public to trace the relationships between elected officials and the special interests that bankroll their careers.

“People who are still in office, their financial records are being destroyed? That’s just crazy,” said Jon Bartholomew, director of the Maine chapter of Common Cause, which advocates for clean elections. “I doubt there’s been any malicious actions by the city clerks, but it is disconcerting that they wouldn’t understand the rationale for holding onto these documents.”

“Ideally you would keep disclosures of how elections are financed and how candidates raise their money forever because it’s good to know what a contributors track record is with a politician,” says Massie Ritsch of the Center for Responsive Politics in Washington, DC, which tracks the influence of money in politics. “You’re not just looking to measure how much as that contributor given to the candidate, the lawmaker, the policymaker in the most recent election but what’s the record over time, how good a friend is this contributor to the politician?”

Indeed, the disclosures of candidates for county and statewide offices in Maine are all available online and by law must be kept for at least eight years, according to Jonathan Wayne, executive director of the body that controls those records, the Maine Commission on Government Ethics.

 “Sometimes the significance of campaign finance information does not become apparent for some time and it can be helpful to go back some years to find how who contributed to campaigns,” he explains. “In a lot of cases we intend to keep that data forever.”

Unfortunately, municipal records fall under the jurisdiction of the Maine State Archives, whose personnel have failed to appreciate the purpose of campaign disclosures. The relevant records retention rules never mention these documents, but there is a clause that allows “all elections records not otherwise specified” to be destroyed after two years. According to State Archivist David Cheever, for decades archivists have interpreted that phrase to include campaign disclosures, and have advised city clerks that they may destroy them accordingly.

Cheever says the Archives have in fact been aware of the issue for two to three years and have proposed a new fifteen-year retention rule. Unfortunately, city clerks interviewed for this story say they were not informed of the proposed change, and hundreds of disclosures have been destroyed in the interim.

Since I started reporting this story in early January, the body responsible for the rules change-the Archives Advisory Board-has decided to speed up the process, putting it on the agenda for their June meeting. Until then you might want to have a look at your own town’s records, before somebody shreds them.

-Colin Woodard is an award winning journalist and author of The Lobster Coast. He lives in Portland and maintains www.colinwoodard.com