Big Bucks

An op-ed in the Baltimore Sun has been the topic of local conversation this week. Written by Ellicott City resident Jack Guarneri, its premise is as follows:

Developer donations should be branded as conflict of interest in Howard County

I’m not an expert in campaign finance. I do have questions. How do we decide what entities can and cannot donate? Do we propose sanctioning the acceptance of certain donations, or do we prohibit the act of making the donation by particular entities?

Is it only developers we need to exclude? Anybody else? Will any other businesses have issues come before politicians as they do their jobs as public servants?

Wouldn’t all of them?

Why exclude developers as a group? Why not everybody? Won’t everybody have a particular special interest?

Well, maybe we can allow small individual donations, because 25 dollars over a campaign can hardly be thought to be undue influence. But what happens if we ban all large donations. I mean, a large donation must mean you want something, right? It seems silly to say that only applies to developers.

If you don’t like large donations, then make it so they cannot happen. Don’t paint politicians as shady for accepting them.

Or maybe it’s just the large donations from developers you dislike. You’d just like to draw a big circle around that and ignore everything else.

As I said, I don’t know much about this, but I think it’s a whole lot more complicated than that.

Everyone has their own particular opinion about how campaigns should be financed, whether politicians are influenced by donations, and do on. While we are talking about it I’ll throw in something completely unrelated that’s been only my mind: I think any local politicians who have received donations from Seth Hurwitz should give them back.

What’s your view on campaign donations?