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In Council Campaigns, Relatives on the Payroll


By RAY RIVERA, RUSS BUETTNER and WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM
Published: April 25, 2008

This article is by Ray Rivera, Russ Buettner and William K. Rashbaum.

Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times
The Brooklyn building where Darlene Mealy used part of her apartment as an office, and paid herself with campaign money.

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In 2005, when Larry B. Seabrook, a city councilman from the Bronx, was running for re-election, he committed close to $50,000 — virtually all of his campaign’s privately raised money — to hiring one employee: his brother, the manager of a halfway house.

Mr. Seabrook is hardly alone among City Council members who have hired relatives to help with their political work. A review by The New York Times found that more than a dozen of the 51 current members have used campaign funds to pay family members — or themselves — at election time.
The list includes legislators like Helen Sears, from Queens, who has doled out more than $117,000 in campaign funds to family members since 2001 to help her win and keep her seat. In Brooklyn, Domenic M. Recchia Jr. paid his wife $6,600 in rent in 2005 for the use of part of their family home as a campaign headquarters.

It is not illegal to hire relatives to work on campaigns, although candidates are barred from using any city money provided for their campaigns to pay family members. The Campaign Finance Board said it regularly audits the use of campaign money and has not found that council members are routinely flouting its regulations.

And several council members said hiring relatives is a legitimate way to attract loyal and dedicated workers.

The test for when it is proper to hire a relative to work on a campaign, said one government watchdog, is asking whether the relative is chosen because he or she provides a necessary and particular skill, or is just a family member who could use some work.

“Certainly, having a relative as a campaign manager is something that happens a lot,” said Susan Lerner, executive director of New York Common Cause, a nonprofit lobbying group that promotes open government. “I think that’s a question of trust. But when there are other roles, the question always is: Is there value for the money, or is this just another way to divert campaign funds for personal use?”

The practice of hiring relatives does appear to be assisted, at least in part, by the city program that uses taxpayer dollars to finance campaigns. The central hope in creating the public financing program — the city currently awards $6 for every dollar privately raised — was to provide badly needed funds to candidates who might challenge incumbents, but lacked a ready machine for raising money.

The program was not designed, analysts said, to provide surplus money to candidates in uncontested races who might find themselves able to afford a range of additional expenses, including the hiring of relatives as campaign workers. Indeed, The Times’s review found several instances in which relatives were paid from political treasuries swollen by the addition of public matching funds and in which the candidates were involved in barely competitive races.

In Mr. Seabrook’s case, for instance, he went to the Campaign Finance Board in 2005 seeking the additional taxpayer money in part because he said he feared a hotly contested challenge from a rival he asserted was going to be backed by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

There was little evidence, however, that his opponent, George Rubin, actually posed a threat. In Mr. Rubin’s prior try for public office, a State Senate race, he garnered 531 votes out of more than 90,000 cast. But the Campaign Finance Board approved $71,000 in public matching funds for Mr. Seabrook, nearly double what he raised privately.

The competition never surfaced, though. Mr. Rubin got no financial help from Mr. Bloomberg, or anyone else, never spent a dime on the race, and lost badly to Mr. Seabrook, who collected 87 percent of the vote.

The Council’s spending habits have been the subject of increasing scrutiny.

Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn admitted several weeks ago that the Council had routinely stored public money in holding accounts using fictitious names for local community groups, and later awarded the money to neighborhood organizations in the districts of individual council members. And two aides to a Brooklyn councilman were indicted recently, accused of misusing tens of thousands of dollars in public money.

Though city regulations prohibit candidates from using public money to hire relatives, city officials have long recognized that the taxpayer dollars have the effect of freeing up private funds to do just that.

After the 2003 election, the campaign board said in a report: “Although there are instances in which family members can be appropriately paid, the board realizes the need to address the appearance that public funds are subsidizing both appropriate and possibly inappropriate payments to family members.” Among the actions the board had taken, the report states, was stepping up family disclosure requirements for candidates.

Two years later, Frederick A. O. Schwarz Jr., then the board chairman, said the hiring of relatives by campaigns remained an issue that the city needed to tackle. One idea on the table then, which has never been enacted, was to tally up the amount of private campaign funds being paid out to relatives and to deduct it from the public matching funds for which a candidate had qualified.

One of the issues has long been that some of the spending occurs in races where a candidate has only token opposition. Last year, at the urging of the Campaign Finance Board, the City Council and Mayor Bloomberg tried to address the issue as a part of a series of campaign finance overhauls. Among the requirements, candidates must prove they have legitimate opposition before receiving public matching funds, like showing their opponents have received a major endorsement or won at least 25 percent of the vote in a previous election.

In recent years, council members have used campaign money to offset the cost of their homes, hire relatives for poll work and as paid campaign consultants. One council member paid her father, a former councilman, for political advice. Another sprinkled cash on eight relatives, including a brother- and sister-in-law, for campaign help.

Ms. Sears, for example, hired one son to run her campaign and another to act as her treasurer in 2005. She raised $178,901 in private money and received $92,749 in public funds for that race. Stuart Sears was paid $31,375 as campaign manager and her other son, Todd Sears, received $21,675 to act as her treasurer.

In all, she has paid her two sons and her daughter-in-law $117,322 since 2001, and says she is lucky to have her sons work for her.

“The fact of the matter is, when you’re in a campaign, you need those who are very trustworthy, and my sons are the most trustworthy people you can find,” she said. “I’ve never been in trouble with the Campaign Finance Board, and that is very key, and my sons run a winning campaign. I can’t ask for anything more than that. I consider myself to be very blessed.”

Sometimes, the campaign board requires that family members be paid, in particular in cases when they are professionals who earn a living performing the same skills, like accounting, for which the campaign is using them.

Peter F. Vallone Jr., for example, a City Council member from Queens, paid his brother, Paul, $7,500 to work as a treasurer for his campaign in 2001. He said the board told him he had to pay his brother, who is a lawyer, or the work would have been considered an in-kind contribution.

Ms. Sears declined to answer questions about her sons’ professional backgrounds and what political experience they had when she first hired them for her 2001 campaign.

Others who have hired relatives are Councilwoman Helen D. Foster of the Bronx, who has paid her mother for compliance work and rent for a “treasurer’s headquarters,” and her father, former Councilman Wendell Foster, for campaign consulting. She did not return phone calls seeking comment.

During his closely contested 2001 race, James Sanders Jr., from Queens, paid his brother, Raphael Sanders, a construction worker, $2,100 for services including moving, cleaning and staffing his campaign office.

“When a person runs, usually you’re called on to find people who believe in you,” Mr. Sanders said in an interview. “If your family does not believe in you, then that should be an indicator of your worthiness.”

Councilman James F. Gennaro of Queens paid nearly $49,000 to his stepson, Richard O’Malley, for work on his 2001, 2003 and 2005 campaigns.

Mr. Gennaro’s campaign compliance lawyer, Laurence Laufer, said in a statement that “all employees and consultants were paid market rates as required by the Campaign Finance Board, with whom staffing compensation matters passed muster following a detailed review.”

Mr. Seabrook was billed $82,752 by his brother Oliver for work on his 2003 and 2005 election campaigns. Mr. Laufer, who also represents Mr. Seabrook, said Mr. Seabrook still owed his brother about $40,000 for work from the 2005 campaign. The campaign is now in debt, according to campaign finance records.

Those records show that Oliver Seabrook, who works as the director of the Bronx Community Re-entry Center, served as a campaign manager, as a consultant at breakfasts and black-tie dinners, and on fund-raising and petition drives. A woman who answered the phone at the halfway house on Wednesday said Oliver Seabrook does not accept calls from newspapers.

“I believe it’s a liability that is certainly expected to be paid, but it hasn’t been paid at this point in time,” said Mr. Laufer. “He would have to raise new campaign money to pay it.”

Like Mr. Recchia and Ms. Foster, other council members used a portion of their campaign to pay rent to themselves or close relatives. Kendall Stewart of Brooklyn, for example, paid his wife, Selene, a total of $3,600 in 2003 and 2005 for office space.

Darlene Mealy, who took office in 2006, paid herself $3,500 in rent in 2005 to offset the cost of using a portion of her two-bedroom apartment Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, as a campaign office. She paid herself $350 a month, according to the records she filed with the Campaign Finance Board.

Ms. Mealy declined comment on her rent payments, although an aide, David Jackson, who identified himself as her chief of staff, said “I don’t think your facts are right” when asked about them.

A spokesman for the Campaign Finance Board, Eric Friedman, said the agency had audited Ms. Mealy’s spending, visited her apartment and reviewed records her campaign had filed and found no irregularities. Mr. Friedman said that the city’s standard is to determine if campaign activity is occurring in a location for which rent is being paid and locations that meet that standard, regardless of ownership, are not a problem.

“In her case, these things did not set off alarms,” he said.

But one government watchdog said the practice of candidates paying themselves rent can create an appearance problem.

“That’s very questionable, it seems to me,” Ms. Lerner, of Common Cause, said of the rent payments. “It’s always the type of thing which makes ordinary voters suspicious of the motives of the candidates. It’s the sort of thing that makes ordinary voters dislike politicians.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/25/ny...1&ref=nyregion

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