Campaign finance has become a hot issue in several local Leon County and Tallahassee races. Recently, the candidates for the city commission seat 1 race lobbed attacks at each other about their campaign funding sources.
WFSU News factchecked those claims and found that both sides have some partial-truths, and some misleading information.
During a candidate forum at WFSU last month, current Tallahassee City Commissioner Jack Porter said opponent Rudy Ferguson’s campaign is being funded by special interests while hers is being funded by everyday people.
“I'm proud to have the support of over 1000 individual donations, with an average donation of less than $60 as far as one of my opponents, he is funded by the same developers who we are talking about when we talk about [the] Welaunee [development] and who are supporting urban sprawl and benefiting from it,” she said.
Ferguson, a local pastor, said he is not beholden to anyone for their donations, and that Porter is overrepresenting the number of unique donors she has.
“My opponent said, I have, you know, she has , donors. Let me just be clear when I say this, that she has 400 and each one of those have given at least 15 to 20 times in order to come to make that number more thick. This is what we're dealing with as far as manipulation of our voters,” he said.
Both candidates’ claims about the other are at least partially correct, but also misleading.
Of Ferguson’s 229 campaign donors, a quarter of them come from local businesses that mostly work in construction and real estate. Those businesses have given over a third of Ferguson’s $88 thousand in campaign funds. A chunk of his individual donors are also owners or employees of those companies.
As for Porter, she does have over 1,000 donations, but only 569 of them are unique donors. A chunk of her donors have given small dollar amounts, between $5 and $50 , several times over the past few months. Several of them are set to give the same recurring amount every month. And only three of her donors are local businesses.
