Article by Erik Smith. Published on Tuesday, October 12, 2010 EST.
Tsunami of Money for Initiatives on Deadline Day – More to Come
By Erik Smith
Staff writer/ Washington State Wire
OLYMPIA, Oct. 12.—Call it a gold rush, a tidal wave or what have you, but on the final day for big-money contributions to initiative campaigns, an enormous amount of money came in – a whopping $8 million.
It brought the total for ballot-measure fund-raising to a whopping $54.3 million, a state record.
That’s not the end of it – the final tally is likely to go a bit higher.
Washington state imposes a $5,000 limit on new contributions to ballot-measure campaigns during the final three weeks before an election. But state reporting deadlines raise the possibility that some big contributions made on the final day will not be reported until next week or the week after.
And because campaigns report contributions on a weekly basis, it doesn’t mean that all money came in on the final day – it just looked that way. Among the most significant contributions since the start of the month:
n $2.3 million from the American Beverage Association for Initiative 1107, the tax-rollback measure, bringing its total contribution to $16.7 million.
n $1 million from Costco for I-1100, a liquor-store privatization measure. That comes on top of the $1.2 million that Costco put up last week, and bring its total contribution to $4.5 million. Fred Meyer also put up $200,000, and joined Safeway and Wal-Mart as major contributors.
n Multiple donations from beer-industry groups and wholesaler organizations across the country to the “no” campaign against I-1100 and I-1105. That brings their total spending to more than $7 million.
n $250,000 from the National Education Association for I-1098, the income tax measure. That brings the total from local, state and national teacher’s union affiliates to $878,482.
n Nearly $1 million in contributions to the Defeat 1098 campaign from a large number of individual contributors.
n $25,000 from Conoco Philips for I-1053, the two-thirds tax-vote measure. That makes a grand total of $75,000 from Conoco Philips, and incidentally erases the big green argument against the initiative. BP, a public pariah after the gulf oil spill, is no longer the largest contributor – it has put up only $65,000.
Campaign finance reporting rules state that ballot-measure campaigns are supposed to report at least once a week, on Mondays, after contributions are deposited. They have five business days to deposit checks once they are received. So it’s possible that other big-money contributions will be reported as late as Oct. 25.
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