Barking at big money
City council candidate Ali Cooper says top-dollar donors wield too much influence at City Hall
By Cosmo Garvin
cosmog@newsreview.com
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City council candidate Ali Cooper is doing something pretty unusual in Sacramento politics. He is taking on the corrupting influence of money in City Hall. That’s probably why big-money interests like developer groups, the Sacramento Metro Chamber and Wal-Mart are spending unusually large amounts of money to defeat him.
When Cooper knocks on voters’ doors in Curtis Park or Oak Park or South Land Park Hills or City Farms, he launches into an energetic rap about how City Hall caters to the interests of the wealthy and well-connected over the interests of working people, taxpayers and neighborhoods. He is, after all, a professional organizer, who left his job as political director at SEIU Local 1000 to campaign full time. He can be intense. Some surely find his style, and his message, grating. Bites happens to think he’s right.
Cooper’s opponent, District 5 incumbentJay Schenirer, is bright and creative. But he has marinated himself in special-interest money for the last four years, and it shows.
Bites has written before about Schenirer’s taste for Wal-Mart corporation money, the self-dealing way he uses his Way Up nonprofit organization to solicit donations from wealthy interests in order to burnish his own political “brand.” It’s a trick he learned from his friend Mayor Kevin Johnson. And it’s corrosive.
At a recent election forum in Curtis Park, Cooper went after Schenirer on these shady “behests,” to the point where the nice League of Women Voters lady politely reminded Cooper that it wasn’t that kind of debate. But we need to have that kind of debate.
Cooper wants to prohibit council members from soliciting donations for their own nonprofits from people and businesses that have business before the council. “It’s an enormous temptation to take money for their private ventures on the side, while they’re making policy. We’ve got to end the pay-to-play culture at City Hall,” he said.
He’s also speaking out against the rigged arena process. “We had tens of thousands of people sign a petition asking for a vote on the arena,” Cooper said. Indeed, a public vote on sports subsidies had been policy on the books at City Hall for the last two decades. Schenirer and his colleagues ignored that policy and went to extraordinary lengths to deny the public a vote. Schenirer got elected in part by opposing the giveaway of city-owned parcels to would-be arena developers. Now, he supports the giveaway of millions worth of city land, with no requirements on the developers who are taking it.
Schenirer pushed to scrap economic studies for big-box stores like Wal-Mart, thus hiding information from the public about the effects of mega-retailers on local business. He supports Johnson’s “strong mayor” plan—a winner-take-all system that consolidates power into the hands of Sacramento’s moneyed interests.
So, no surprise that in the last couple of weeks Schenirer’s patrons have dumped $88,000, so far, into an independent-expenditure committee to help hold on to his seat. That’s on top of the 4-to-1 fundraising advantage Schenirer already had, comparing the candidates’ campaign committees.
The special I.E. committee includes money for polling and cable-TV ads—unusual if not Sacramento News & Review - Barking at big money - Bites - Opinions - May 15, 2014:
