Tag Archives: Bill Conway

Adam Pagnucco, Council At-Large, George Leventhal, Hans Riemer, Hoan Dang, Marc Elrich, State Board of Elections

Updated: Preliminary Fundraising Totals in Public Campaign Financing, September 2017

By Adam Pagnucco.

This morning, we posted preliminary fundraising totals for candidates in public financing.  But one of those reports was wrong because of a problem with the State Board of Elections’ processing software.  This post contains updated information.

Shortly after our original post, we received the following communication from Council At-Large candidate Hoan Dang’s campaign.

Hi Adam, this is Jonathon Rowland, campaign manager for Hoan Dang.  Thank you for the article this morning.  I just want to correct the amount stated.  When we filed with the Board of Elections, our report was duplicated because of a glitch in the system giving us double the amount of donations.  We have been in contact with the Board of Elections since Monday to resolve this issue.  The actual amount of donations is 316.

When your author called Rowland for more details, he said that the Dang campaign found the error first and asked the board to correct it.  Board staff acknowledged the mistake and said that they were working with their IT developer to fix it going forward.  No public funds were ever distributed before the Dang campaign caught the mistake.

Including information provided by Dang’s campaign today, here is the updated comparison of the five campaigns who have applied for public financing.

Dang is not the leader in public financing.  George Leventhal, who is running for Executive, is the overall leader in qualifying contributors and receipts.  (Executive candidates get higher match rates than council candidates.)  Among the council candidates, incumbent Hans Riemer leads in qualifying contributors and Bill Conway leads in matching funds.  This should not discount a strong performance by Dang, whose financial numbers are not terribly different from Riemer’s.

Going forward, we hope the state prevents the kinds of mistakes that affected Dang’s campaign.  In the initial glitchy filing, Dang supposedly requested $148,328 in public matching funds.  (Again, the IT glitch was not Dang’s fault.)  In the updated filing, Dang requested $74,144 in public matching funds.  That’s a $74,184 difference.  If Dang had not caught the mistake, could that difference have conceivably been paid out?  There’s no evidence available on that point.  But for the good of public confidence in the county’s public financing system, we hope such a mistake never happens.

On a different issue, we asked what happened to Council Member Marc Elrich’s filing for public matching funds in our original post.  Elrich said he had enough contributors to qualify back in June but has not filed yet.  When asked about it on Leventhal surrogate Saqib Ali’s Facebook page, Elrich said his delay in filing was related to a payment his campaign had made to the county party, which was subsequently ruled to not be in compliance with public financing requirements.  We reprint Elrich’s statement below.

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Adam Pagnucco, Council At-Large, George Leventhal, Hans Riemer, Hoan Dang, Marc Elrich

Preliminary Fundraising Totals in Public Campaign Financing, September 2017

By Adam Pagnucco.

Correction: The numbers for Hoan Dang in this post are inaccurate.  For updated numbers on Dang and a response by Marc Elrich, please visit our updated post.

One of the virtues of public campaign financing is the rapid release of financial reports for participating candidates.  That’s right, folks – for this group of candidates, there is no need to wait until January to see fundraising numbers.  That’s because when they qualify for public matching funds and request them from the state, their financial reports are released almost immediately.  This is terrific for all data junkies like your author as well as inquiring minds among the readers!

Below is a summary for the five candidates who have applied to receive matching funds from the state.  Bear in mind the following characteristics of the data.  First, the number of qualifying contributors means the number of contributors who live in Montgomery County.  Non-residents can contribute up to $150 each but the state will not authorize matching funds for them.  Second, the individual contribution amounts are the basis on which the state determines how much in public matching funds will be released.  Third, the date of cash balance is important because it varies depending on when the applications were sent in.  That is unlike the regular reporting dates on which financial positions are summarized at the same time for all candidates.  And fourth, for those candidates who have only filed once (which includes everyone except George Leventhal), the cash balances do not include public funds from the state.  To estimate the cash positions of those candidates, the cash balance should be added to the public matching funds they requested.

What do we make of this?

1.  Let’s start with the obvious: there are a lot of small checks out there!  While many contributors are probably donating to more than one of these five campaigns, it’s not a stretch to say that close to a thousand people will have contributed by some point in the near future.  It’s hard to make comparisons with the past without exquisitely detailed research to back it up (anyone want to pay us for that?) but our hunch is that this is a larger early donor pool than in prior cycles.

2.  The big story here is Council At-Large candidate Hoan Dang.  At-Large Council Members George Leventhal (who is running for Executive) and Hans Riemer (the only incumbent running for reelection) have a combined 22 years of representing the whole county.  But Dang had more in-county contributors than either one of them!  How does that happen?  Dang ran for Delegate in District 19 in 2010.  He was financially competitive, raising $103,418, but he finished fifth out of six candidates.  There was no reason going into this race to believe that Dang would receive more grassroots financial support than Leventhal or Riemer.  But so far, he has.

3.  Dang is not the only story.  Look at first-time candidate Bill Conway, who collected more private funds than Riemer primarily by having a larger average contribution.  In most elections, challengers struggle to be financially competitive with incumbents.  But the early performances of Conway and Dang relative to Riemer suggest that, at least among publicly-financed candidates, some or all of that gap may be closed.  Our hunch is that a group of at-large candidates will all hit the public matching funds cap of $250,000 and therefore have similar budgets heading into mail season.  The big question will then become how those totals compare to what candidates in the traditional system, like Marilyn Balcombe, Charlie Barkley, Ashwani Jain and Cherri Branson, will raise.

4.  Where is Marc Elrich?  The three-term at-large Council Member and Executive candidate announced that he had qualified for matching funds back in June at roughly the same time that Leventhal and Riemer said the same.  Riemer followed up by filing for matching funds and Leventhal did it twice.  Why hasn’t Elrich filed more than two months after his announcement?  One suspects that the bewildering paperwork requirements of public financing are responsible for the delay, but political types are starting to chatter about it.

That’s all for now.  Candidates, keep those reports coming in so your favorite blog has more material for the readers!

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Adam Pagnucco, Council At-Large

First Impressions, Part Two

By Adam Pagnucco.

Bill Conway, Potomac

Many readers have encountered Diana Conway, one of MoCo’s most tenacious and effective environmental activists.  As she is someone who has long been involved in local elections, your author had long assumed that a Conway might someday appear on the ballot.  Well, we were half-right – the Conway who is running is her husband, Bill.

Bill Conway is a recently retired energy lawyer who is a nationally recognized expert on the electric power industry.  He once worked as a U.S. Senate staffer and played a key role in designing wholesale electricity deregulation in the early 1990s.  He’s a heavy hitter and with a profile like that, one might assume that Conway would come across as a know-it-all.  But then you meet him.

Conway’s intelligence is as obvious as his immense likability.  But his greatest asset is his curiosity.  Your author has interviewed dozens of candidates over the years.  Most of them are reluctant to admit ignorance on anything for fear of coming across as unready for elected service.  Not Conway.  While he certainly has plenty of knowledge and opinions – he is just as animated in discussing social justice as he is about the need to grow the economy – he is comfortable enough in his own skin to ask questions.  LOTS of questions.  Your author has never met a candidate who took such deep dives on policy issues right off the bat – for HOURS – as Conway.

Intellectual curiosity may be the single most underrated trait in great elected officials.  Their job is to deal with a tremendous variety of issues that demand attention and expertise, often many in the same day.  The best of them learn quickly and love to learn.  Bill Conway has a lot going for him but he has that trait in spades.  It will serve him and his constituents well if he gets elected.

PS – Right now, no at-large candidate is working harder than Conway on the campaign trail.  Here’s the proof.

Gabe Albornoz, Kensington

Imagine working your way up the ladder quickly and landing a dream job.  Everything is great, yeah?  And then less than two years later, the cuts begin.  By the time it’s all over, your budget is down 23% and your employees’ work years are down 22%.  Is it still a dream job?

Gabe Albornoz would say yes even though that actually happened to him.  As the county’s Director of Recreation, his department took those cuts between Fiscal Years 2008 and 2012, some of the biggest cuts to any part of the government.  Albornoz had to look people in the eye and let them go, something almost all managers hate to do.  But he got through it by concentrating reductions in force at the middle management level and empowering front-line employees to make more decisions.  No recreation centers were closed and Albornoz recruited non-profits and community groups to help fill the gap.  That’s one reason why Albornoz is considered one of the best managers in county government.

But that’s not all he is.  Albornoz is also the former Chair of the Montgomery County Democratic Central Committee and steered the party through some difficult conflicts with labor.  Many new candidates have to spend time building relationships with players across the county – and it’s a BIG county.  Albornoz already has those relationships – with elected officials, civic associations, community groups, faith groups and everyone else he has worked with in county government over the last decade.  Unusually, he seems to be almost devoid of enemies.  (Explain how you do that to this blog author, Gabe!)  It’s a large network that could pay big dividends.

The knock on many people in legislative positions is that they know nothing about running a government, or a large organization of any kind.  No one could say that about Gabe Albornoz.  He is among the best prepared people to ever run for Montgomery County Council.

More to come in Part Three.

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Adam Pagnucco, Council At-Large

Bill Conway to Qualify for Public Funding

By Adam Pagnucco.

Bill Conway, who is running for Council At-Large, has announced that he has raised enough small individual contributions in the county’s public financing system to qualify for public matching funds.  Assuming that the State Board of Elections agrees, Conway would be the second at-large candidate (after incumbent Hans Riemer) to collect public money.

We will have more to say about Conway and several other at-large candidates in an upcoming series.  His press release appears below.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Friday July 7, 2017

Bill Conway Is First Non-Incumbent, At-Large County Council Candidate  To Reach Threshold For Receiving Public Matching Funds

Bill Conway, a Democratic at-large candidate for Montgomery County Council, announced today that his campaign has collected more than 250 contributions from Montgomery County residents, totaling more than $28,000. Once the contributions have been certified by the Maryland State Board of Elections, Conway’s campaign will be eligible to receive more than $84,000 from the Public Election Fund.

Under the public campaign finance law, an at-large candidate for County Council qualifies for matching funds after receiving at least 250 contributions totaling at least $20,000 from county residents. Contributions are matched under the following schedule: first $50 is matched 4×1; second $50 is matched 3×1; third $50 is matched 2×1. This results in a $50 contribution becoming $250, a $100 contribution becoming $450 and a $150 contribution becoming $600.

Participation in the public finance program is voluntary.  Candidates who participate in the program may not accept contributions of more than $150 per individual and may not accept contributions from PACs, corporations or labor unions.

“I’m participating in the public finance program because I believe that every voter should have a meaningful voice in electing our leaders,” Conway said. “I am deeply grateful to my supporters for the confidence they have shown in me through their contributions. If elected to the Council I will bring substantial legislative and business experience, a record of policy innovation, and a commitment to listening to all sides of the issues.”

Visit Bill’s website:

www.billconwayforcouncil.com

and his Facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/Bill-Conway-for-Council-294085764336433/

to learn more about his campaign.

###

Contact:

Doug Wallick – Campaign Manager

info@billconwayforcouncil.com

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