#QuestionTheSource

Massive Amounts of Outside Contributions Threaten Local Control of Public Education. When you receive political mail, we encourage you to #QuestionTheSource.

On August 28th, retired teacher educator Victoria Defenthaler defeated incumbent Rebeca Negron for Martin County School Board, District 3. Mrs. Negron is the wife of Senate President Joe Negron. She is also a member of the rogue school board association (Florida Coalition of School Board Members, read more here) and a proponent of “school choice.” Defenthaler beat Negron with more than 56 percent of the vote but the campaign was not easy. As reported in TCPalm, Ms. Negron’s campaign was aided by mass mailings and attack ads, funded by political action committees (PACs):

“… aspects of Negron’s tenure were featured in mass mailings from the Florida Education Empowerment PAC, based in Lutz, north of Tampa. This PAC spent $30,957 on mailings for Negron, and $4,140 on other media, records show.

Negron could not be reached for comment Tuesday.

Another PAC, Good Government for Florida, based in Tallahassee, targeted Defenthaler in a series of attack ads.

One ad labeled her “Double dipping Defenthaler” for receiving “taxpayer-funded paychecks” and her pension from her 40-year career as an educator, then running “to collect a taxpayer-funded salary” as a board member.

A different ad from the same PAC criticized Defenthaler’s support from the National Education Association, which the ad labeled as “an extreme liberal group that supports common core and opposes President Trump…”

Defenthaler said many people reached out to her about the flyers, saying they were bothered by how she was portrayed. She said she couldn’t believe how much money poured into the race.”

This blog is meant to look at this Martin County School Board campaign while serving as a beginner’s guide to using the internet to determine who is really funding local school board races and other campaigns.

When investigating a candidate’s finances, the first step is to look up Candidate information on your county’s Supervisors of Elections website. Your county’s website will list the candidates, and their financial reports, for county and local offices and committees/PACs.  Candidates for federal, state and multi-county offices, as well as political action committees, are reported on the Division of Elections of the Department of State Website. Learning about a candidates finances is easy:

• Click on candidates info and find your candidate.
• When you click on your candidate, you will have access to all of their submitted financial records.
• From here you will be able to find detailed reports of all campaign contributions and expenditures.

For example, in Martin County the website is martinvotes.com. By clicking on Candidate Information, you can find a list of 2018 Qualified Candidates which lists both Ms. Defenthaler and Ms. Negron. Both candidates raised a decent amount of money with Ms. Defenthaler raising almost $15,000 more than Ms. Negron.

From the website, you can click on any Reporting Period to find details of who donated to the campaign and where those funds were spent. For example, Ms. Negron received donations from her husband and some of his Florida Senate friends, like Don Gaetz. She also received funds from several PACs, including $1,000 each from the Education Priority Fund based in Sebastian, and Orlando-based Realtors Political Advocacy Group. From Ms. Negron’s  Reporting Period M5:

While it is easy to identify individual donors, the money coming from the PACs can be less transparent. By Florida law, campaigns, committees, and electioneering communications organizations are required to disclose detailed financial records of campaign contributions and expenditures. You can find these reports at dos.myflorida.com.

• Click on Search Committee Database
• You can search for a specific PAC by Name, Officer, Committee Affiliates or Purpose.
• Click on the PAC you are interested in from the search results and you will be taken to its basic information page, identifying its address, chairperson and treasurer and registered agent.
• Click on the “Campaign Finance Activity” button. Here you will see the PACs campaign finance summaries, by reporting period.
• If you search for Expenditures, you can find how this PAC has spent its money, including any campaign donations to candidates. For School Board races in Florida, there is a $1,000 limit for contributions to individual candidates for each election cycle.
• If you search for Contributions, you can see who is contributing to the PAC.
• Often you will find other Political Action Committees  on both the contributions and expenditures lists. To learn more about these PACs you can start another search at Search Committee Database.

For example, to search for the “Education Priority Fund” go to dos.myflorida.com and click on “Search Committee Database.” Search for “Education Priority Fund”  by name.

If you Search for “Education Priority” you will find the PAC that donated to Ms. Negron: “Education Priority Fund.”

By clicking on Education Priority Fund you learn the Chairperson and Registered Agent of this PAC is Shawn Frost. Mr. Frost is the current chair of the Indian River County School Board and the former President of the Florida Coalition of School Board Members, the rogue, pro-choice school board association Ms. Negron belongs to.

If you click on “Campaign Finance Activity” and then search for Expeditures, you can find the contribution to Ms. Negron, along with campaign contributions to other School Board candidates around the state: Melody Johnson (Volusia), Bridget Ziegler (Sarasota), Ed Wilson (Marion) and Latanya Peterson (Clay).

To find where this money came from you can Search for Contributions. Recently, the main funding for the Education Priority Fund comes from 2 PACs: Treasure Coast Alliance and Mainstream Leadership Council.

If you again Search the Committee Database: you discover that Main Street Leadership Council is a Tallahassee-based PAC funded primarily by the Republican Party of Florida and the Treasure Coast Alliance is a PAC chaired by Ms. Negron’s husband, Joe, and funded by a variety of sources including lobbyists and charter school advocates.

If you similarly search Ms. Defenthaler’s Candidate info you can determine who contributed to her campaign. For example, Ms. Defenthaler received a $1,000 donation from Orange County Fund for Children and Public Education, a PAC managed by Orange County Teacher, Joshua Katz, which receives most of its contributions from Orange County Classroom Teachers’ Association.

In addition to making contributions directly to candidates, several political action committees tried to influence the Martin School Board race through direct mail campaigns and other campaign activities. All political mail is required to have a “Paid for” disclaimer. You can track such PAC activity by taking note of the “Paid For” disclaimer. For example, this ad attacking three Clay County School Board candidates was paid for my “Committee to Protect Florida.”

When you receive political mail, please take note of who is paying to support or attack school board candidates, and other candidates, in your local elections.

As reported in TCPalm, Good Government for Florida, targeted Defenthaler in a series of attack ads. On 8/15/18, Public Concepts, LLC, a Jupiter public relations firm was paid $41,954.81 for “advertising.” Jupiter is in Martin County. Could this be the funding for the Defenthaler attack ads? Who funds Good Government for Florida? Again, search the data base and you find that, in 2018, two PACs were the sole donors to Good Government for Government: 

On 8/14/2018, Sunshine State Freedom Fund donated $42,000 to Good Government for Florida. The following day Good Government for Florida paid a PR firm $42,000 for advertising… can you see the pattern? Sunshine State Freedom Fund is primarily funded by other PACs. Which ones had an interest in getting Ms. Negron elected?

TCPalm also reported campaign mailers regarding Ms. Negron were funded by the Florida Education Empowerment PAC. A quick search shows this PAC is chaired by John Kirtley, a Tampa based venture capitalist who founded and chairs Florida’s school voucher program, Step Up For Students. He also serves on the boards of Betsy DeVos’ American Federation for Children, the Florida Charter School Alliance, and the James Madison Institute.

A Search of this summer’s expenditures from Mr. Kirtley’s PAC show the extent of support Ms. Negron received:

Florida Education Empowerment PAC paid

• $36,330 to Public Concepts LLC for miscellaneous ads
• $30,958 for Direct Mail for Rebecca Negron
• $60,801 for Direct Mail for Martin County School Board
• $52,140 for a media by to Strategic Media Placement, Inc. for Rebecca Negron

It appears that this Florida Education Empowerment PAC may have spent over $180,000 trying to get Mrs. Negron re-elected. They also paid Lasher Consulting over $44,000 for “live voter calls,” though it is impossible to know if those were part of this school board campaign.

It is interesting that Ms. Negron’s fellow Florida Coalition of School Member, Shawn Frost’s political consulting firm, MVP Strategy and Policy LLC, also received $12,740 for research, mileage and digital ads. Recall that Mr. Frost’s Education Priority Fund, is the Joe Negron supported PAC that contributed to Mrs. Negron’s campaign.

There seems to be a lot of back-scratching going on here…

In 2018, Florida Education Empowerment PAC was funded by John Kirtley, himself, Jim Walton, the First Amendment Fund and in late July and early August $103,000 from a PAC called Taxpayers in Action.

Taxpayers in Action received $105,000 (in two payments on 7/20 and 8/4/2018) from Treasure Coast Alliance, Joe Negron’s PAC.

There is a lot of money flowing around this “school choice” school board candidate.

Total funding of Ms. Negron’s campaign appears to have surpassed a quarter of a million dollars:

• $31,000 Direct Campaign Contributions
• $42,000 Good Government for Florida PAC
• $180,000 Florida Education Empowerment PAC for direct mail, media and miscellaneous ads.
• possibly $44,000 Florida Education Empowerment PAC for “live voter calls”

All this for a $35,216/year school board position. It is outrageous.

In our opinion, local school board races should be funded by the local community. A duly elected school board is essential for the local control of public education.  Communities should be electing the candidate they prefer, without excessive outside influence. When hundreds of thousands of dollars, from outside sources, are spent on school board races, local control is threatened. We commend Ms. Defenthaler for running and winning her grass roots campaign. We are glad voters saw past the money and the attack ads and voted for the pro-public school candidate.

We encourage readers to investigate the PAC money influencing their local elections and to call out the influence when you see it. #QuestionTheSource