Emilie Oy Strikes (Out) Again
Somewhere in Thursday’s Theo, there’s an article on the financial difficulties Emilie Oy could face if it’s determined that she must return her public campaign funds and/or pay any penalties.
In it, Oy digs herself into an even deeper hole in terms of the strange and mysterious techniques of literacy and motivation to understand what she’s doing.
“If we’ve made mistakes, it’s just because I’m a first-time candidate, and the regulations don’t specify a lot of these things,” she said after the League of Women Voters forum. “They need to fix the system, to close up these loopholes, to make it clearer to candidates what we can and cannot do. The regulations do not specify a lot of what new candidates need to know.”
As I noted yesterday, the reality is that the City provides easy access to the code itself, the system’s administrative rules, and the state’s own campaign finance laws — the latter being the most directly relevant to the issues regarding Oy’s suspect signature sheets. But her lack of literacy and/or motivation goes deeper still.
The city’s public financing regulations make certain things very clear: Candidates are responsible for every penny they spend. Anyone paid by a campaign must do bonafide work and get paid the going market rate. Candidates cannot pay household bills or rent, or buy household supplies.
Boyles, 40, a first-time politician, says she’s followed those guidelines: Although she gave her daughter, a recent high school graduate, three checks over three days totaling $12,500, the girl actually earned $2,500 a month for five months of hard work.
That appears to violate the public finance code, because candidates are not supposed to pay staff for work done before they qualified for public cash or work they haven’t done yet. Boyles got her money at the end of February.
So even if we set aside the question of whether $12,500 is the “market rate” for putting up a website, a Google Group, a Yahoo! profile, and a MySpace page, Oy appears to have paid her daughter all in advance, and possibly for work done prior to qualifying for the funds.
Further evidence that Oy appears to have done little, if any, reading on the City’s publicly-funded campaign system prior to — or even while — availing herself of its cash.
But why stop there when the hole can be dug even deeper still?
… Why did Boyles pay a flat $11,400 to lease her campaign headquarters when the two other publicly financed candidates are paying $650 each month in rent? She says she assumed she was going to make the November runoff and need office space through the fall.
Again, that seems to go against the code: According to the city election officer, candidates are supposed to spend their public money only for this election — the May primary.
Still further evidence that Oy appears to have done little, if any, reading on the City’s publicly-funded campaign system prior to — or even while — availing herself of its cash.
Yesterday, the notion jokingly was raised that Oy could be “a mole for the Burdick campaign out to discredit voter-owned elections.”
I will admit part of me briefly toyed with going all conspiratorial in precisely that way, but even I shied away from it. If nothing else, I’m not convinced that Oy’s denseness extends to the point where she’d expose herself to prosecution, fine, or arrest just to prove the point of Ginny Burdick, Gard & Gerber, and the First Things First Committee.
So it’s surely not an intentional plot against publicly-financed campaigns. But I wonder if Oy cares that she’s handed opponents of the system a gift greater than even all of their dirty cash could have bought them.
One final note. I’m going to guess that perhaps it was some sort of Freudian slip which led to Anna Griffin writing this sentence: “She says she’s talked with state investigators but thinks her campaign did everything above the law.”
The only question is whether the slip was Griffin’s or Oy’s, since to be “above the law” means to act in the belief that the law does not apply to you. Someone please let me know if it was Oy herself who managed to let loose with this (perhaps unintentionally) revealing phrase.