Campaign $$$: Reports must post online

By Gregg Wendorf
Advance News Journal

Not sure what percentage of new laws passed during each regular session of the Texas Legislature actually offer some benefit to us, the taxpaying public, as opposed to being some favor for a friend.

No doubt we’re in the minority.

Which is why I don’t know why a new state law impacting all local campaigns — cities, school districts, county offices — hasn’t garnered more attention, more media publicity. For the general public, this should be news that is worthy indeed of high praise.

Thanks to Texas House Bill 2626, which became law approximately two months ago, Sept. 1, all local governments are now required to post campaign finance reports on their own website and keep them there for at least five years.

As defined, “local governments” include: counties, cities, school districts, hospital districts, library districts, utility districts, and water districts.

I have to check with the Texas Press Association and see if it’s written about it.

The association publishes a monthly newsletter, and I may have missed it, or it’s set to be published in an upcoming issue — news that campaign finance reports must be published online.

The weird part is, if I Google — “New Texas law requires local governments to post campaign finance reports online” — the only story I get back is one, just one, written by ValleyCentral.com’s (KGBT) Dave Hendricks.

Did he just scoop all state media?

Not sure, but I can’t find any other stories about this topic other than the ones he posted Nov. 2., which carried that same headline I just Googled: “New Texas law requires local governments to post campaign finance reports online” The other stories, links, located at Google all cite esoteric news — “Guide to a Local Filing Authority’s Duties Under…” (Source: Texas Ethics Commission.)

Kudos to Hendricks if he just scooped all of us, because more of us in the news business should have been paying attention to all the new laws passed by the legislature this session. The one mandating public disclosure online of local campaign finance reports is real transparency, and you don’t see that very often, and it’s gone under-reported.

To their credit, some cities and school districts were already posting their respective campaign finance reports online, but I’m not going to mention them, because I’ll just leave someone out by mistake; but they were in the minority, by far.

Look at this it way, though, this newspaper’s staff recently went through a process of requesting campaign finance reports for all of 2021 and 2022 from four school districts that reside within Hidalgo County.

The range of difficulty getting them after filing a public information request, which is supposed to be answered within 10 business days, unless a delay is requested for an additional 10, was all over the map, both in terms of making the initial public info request online, and then getting back an answer and/or the requested material. This new law, passed by state Rep. Carl Tepper, R-Lubbock, is a boon to civilization much less the tax-paying public.

The deal is, for too long, in some cities, school districts, money has held sway. The vendors who dump the most into a local campaign either live or die by their choices. That’s not the way it should be, which is something to which we should all agree — money shouldn’t buy an election and the subsequent perks that come along with that.

The best bidder, vendor should get the job.

One way to at least shed a light on this is to publish or provide a link now to all of the campaign finance reports. Write more stories about the biggest supporters of a campaign, and then connect the dots.

The job now of connecting them just got that much easier, and there should be more stories written about Texas House Bill 2626, published, no matter the medium, because getting our hands on the campaign finance reports just got that much easier.

This needs fact-checking, but one of my handy, albeit not totally reliable, AI chatbots just told me that of the 50 states, 40 have some similar law in place — all campaign finance reports get posted online.

Occasionally, the good guys, in this case, the general public, can catch a break. This is one of those times.