Now, the Local Races Are Awash in Cash

By MICHAEL LARIS
The Washington Post

Jeffrey Osborn says he was surprised at how cheap it was to sway Loudoun County's elections. "The builders have been buying the county for just dirt," he says. So Osborn, a venture capitalist, set out to beat them at their own game by pumping more than $50,000 into the campaigns to support eight slow-growth candidates for the county board of supervisors in 1999. They all won.

Stunned by the defeat, pro-development interests in the Washington suburb have vowed to unseat the new board, which has sliced more than 80,000 houses from county plans. "If you are a major player in a billion-dollar industry, are you going to let your industry evaporate?" asked Bryan Brooks, a local developer. The developers' response? Up the ante.

That's no small threat in Virginia, known' nationally as the Wild West of campaign finance. There are no contribution limits for state or local offices here, making anything possible. "If you want to give $6 billion to some guy who's running for sheriff or local delegate, you can do it," says Steve Calos, executive director of the Richmond-based Center for Open, Ethical and Accountable Government.

Big money goes small town? You betcha. Americans are used to thinking of national politics as the place where the big decisions get made-and where the big money gets spent. That premise drove the campaign finance reform legislation President Bush signed last month. But that ballyhooed legislation did nothing to stem the flow of money to local and state campaigns. Local politics are just as fortified - some say corrupted - by cash as federal ones, and often more so. From the Blue Ridge mountain foothills of Loudoun to Laguna Hills, Calif., the excesses of K Street are flourishing on the Main Streets that lead to the nation's state houses, city halls and county buildings.

The most intimate arena of our democracy can also be the easiest to manipulate. A little money can go a long way in local contests. 'The rules are looser, and fewer people are watching to see if those rules are followed. Voter turnout is often lower, giving one-issue champions and special interest groups greater influence. As on Capitol Hill, contributions often make great investments. "People don't give money to honor America or show their love of democracy. They are buying something," says Calos. "Money buys results."

This appears to be true across the country. Samantha Sanchez, who runs the Helena, Mont.-based Institute on Money in State Politics, has spent a decade quantifying those results. "The general rule is that money has a very high correlation with success," she says. "No matter how much money there is in politics, or how little, it does seem to matter." Sanchez's institute tracks 16,000 local and state races. Candidates with the most money win about 85 percent of the time. Including statewide gubernatorial contests, the average cost per voter was $19.05 in 1998.

With money come bad habits. Tactics that have tainted national politics serve as models for local politicians. Issues ads, soft money, personal attacks, push polls, flimsy criminal investigations and endless campaigns are now part of the scene as challengers wage war against the incumbents.

Why does this matter? It matters because local governments are incubators of democratic culture. They are the places where citizens can learn firsthand the art of compromise and governance. This is a truth we recognize in other countries. We urge China, in an effort to cultivate democracy, to hold elections in villages and townships. We saw Poland's Solidarity trade union as a foundry of democratic values in the communist era. In South Africa, black civic associations and boycott groups were seen as forerunners of a post-apartheid democratic ethos. America's local elections are just as important. If they are corrupted by money, or appear to be, then our own democratic culture will be undermined.

Big money has been lured to local elections in large part because local politicians possess one of the strongest governmental powers of all: the power to decide how land is used. This power has been controversial in Loudoun, where dairy farms have been replaced by a bigger cash cow: Dulles International Airport and the businesses it has brought to the area near it. The countryside is beautiful, crime is low, the schools are good and people can't seem to get enough of the place, making it one of the fastest-growing counties in the nation - and a test case in the national debate over what some call sprawl and others call progress.

The statistic that often serves as shorthand for changes in Loudoun is that the population doubled in the 1990s. But here's another statistic that tells Loudoun's story. In the same period, the cost - per vote - to get elected chairman of the county board more than tripled, to $11.39 in 1999. The three candidates that year spent a total of $328,675.

Back in 1991, county elections were more modest affairs. George Barton, who won in 1991 by promising to build the county out of recession, says his largest contribution came from an orthopedic surgeon who gave him $1,200. By the next election, developers were the biggest givers; Affordable Shelter PAC, a homebuilders group, contributed $4,000 to the winning candidate. Four years later, the slow-growth advocates proved themselves just as willing to use deep pockets, writing big checks to a political action committee called Voters to Stop Sprawl to fund slick mailings that read: "This is our county - Let's take it back." Osborn and his company gave at least $12,000 to that year's winner.

This big-ticket activism hasn't enhanced any sense of community. With the influx of campaign money, Loudoun's contests have become uglier and voter turnout has dropped. Fifty percent of registered voters cast ballots in Loudoun's local elections in 1991. In 1999, 34 percent came out, less than half the number who cast ballots for president in 2000. The 1999 race was a venomous, fratricidal brawl between pro-growth and slow-growth Republican leaders in the largely Republican county. "It's just gotten more personal. When it gets personal, it gets negative-and I think negative campaigns are more expensive to run," says Barton, a Republican with friends in both camps. "It just costs so gosh-darn much it boggles the mind."

A cross the country, Orange County, Calif., is a vision of what Loudoun's future may hold. There, where cities and suburbs have replaced citrus groves, ever-larger sums of money have flowed into one of the nation's costliest local fights. This political fray also stars an airport. In 1994 voters zoned the World War II-era El Toro Marine base for a commercial airport. Last month, 58 percent of Orange County voters cast ballots to put a park there instead. City and county officials, as well as a variety of private individuals and groups on both sides, spent a total of between $30 million and $40 million to influence the outcomes.

Bill Kogerman, a retired Marine lieutenant colonel who has led the fight against the airport, says the key to his success was his ability to marshal funds. "My profession was fighting the enemies of this country. I was not skilled in the beginning in fighting political enemies," says Kogerman, who lost two previous attempts to block the airport. "The lesson clearly was: Money spoke." He adds, "Money equals power and power equals the ability to get the message out."

Mounting campaign expenditures are transforming even seemingly obscure races. Last month candidates for the unpaid township-level post of Republican Party committeemen in Cook County, M., invested in glossy mailings, yard signs, newspaper ads and phone banks. The winners help choose county and state party chairmen. For one spot, the victor spent more than $30,000, twice as much as his rival, and netted approximately 70 percent of about 10,000 votes cast, according to political consultant Dan Patlak, president of Chicago's Landslide Group.

Money weeds out many potential candidates. "It can get discouraging because it's a daunting task," Patlak says. "That's how it is and that's how it's going to be. Raising money is the number one job of a candidate."

Spending has also soared for state senate and assembly seats. In Florida, candidates for those offices spent a total of $39.7 million in 2000, up from $23.4 million in 1998. One Democrat, who won a close primary with just 4,085 votes and then ran unopposed, raised $239,500 in campaign funds. The state house speaker, Tom Feeney (R), raised more than $450,000, which was more than six times his Democratic foe.

"Politics has turned into an arms race in fundraising," says Bob Hall, a researcher for North Carolina-based Democracy South, which focuses on campaign finance reform. "It's a corrupting and sad situation for the regular citizen."

Not for Christopher T. Gates. Gates is president of the National Civic League, founded in 1894, by Teddy Roosevelt and others to fight urban graft. He says the nation faces a similar opportunity now. Gates believes local governments can drive progressive campaign reforms. "People really look at Washington as an impediment to social change, not an engine of social change," he says. "At the state and local level, people are much more open and willing to try new ideas."

The League tracks 134 local reform initiatives. Westminster, Colo., for example, bars city council members from debating or voting on any issue that directly affects contributors who gave more than $100. Richland, Wash., sets a voluntary "reasonable maximum expenditure" limit and publishes ads in the local paper every week naming the candidates who exceed it. In Tucson, candidates who sign a contract accepting spending limits get public financing. And Fort Collins, Colo., imposed the lowest contribution limits in the country: $50 per donor.

Gates says that these efforts make government more democratic. "Once that argument is made, there will be a windfall of reforms," he says.

Perhaps. But even simple-and seemingly easy-reforms have stalled. When Virginia election officials proposed that counties help pay for a system for filing local campaign reports electronically-which could ease access and spur scrutiny-the idea fell flat. The state wouldn't come up with the seed money,

Meanwhile, in Loudoun, candidates for county office are filling war chests for the next election. "For me to win reelection, I think I'll have to raise twice what I raised in the last election and that will be 50 percent less than what will be spent against me," County Supervisor Charles A. Harris says. That's saying a lot. Harris, a green-leaning Democrat, spent $36,115 on his race in 1999, and won by 12 out of 4,836 votes cast. That worked out to $18.15 for every one of the votes cast for him, three times what the winner spent for every vote in 1995.

Suzanne Volpe, chairman of the Loudoun Republican Committee and part of the party's pro-growth wing, says party coffers have swelled tenfold in 10 months, "Believe it or not, I think our job is going to be really easy to take back the Board of Supervisors," she says.

Bryan Brooks is ready to contribute. Brooks builds small subdivisions in Loudoun and says slow growers are elitists who want the countryside for themselves. He has helped fund a campaign by a pro-development group called Citizens for Property Rights to assail the slow-growth board. 'We're in the transition stage between a good-ol'-boys, small-town deal and the real deal," he says. "It's the big leagues now." And if the next election comes down to a fundraising showdown, he added, "we'll landslide them."

Jeffrey Osborn, a former top Internet executive who lives part of the year on 28 acres in Loudoun, was the biggest slow-growth contributor in 1999. He's ready to help defend his legacy from his reinvigorated opponents. "They don't have a problem with elections being bought," Osborn says. "They have a problem with other people doing it." His point resonates. People in Loudoun may think that the fight over land is ugly, but the one over money is a far more important threat, one that could undermine local democracy.