Politics

Slow Advances in Campaign Transparencies
By Chelsea Rice

BROOKLINE —The transparency around campaign financing will soon receive a technology boost, but town leaders are still frustrated with a lack of campaign financing regulation.

Elected officials’ campaign financing records are still manually scanned into computers and posted in large files onto Brookline’s town website. The Committee on Campaign Finance, which formed five years ago in response to growing campaign expenditures in selectmen races, met on Sept. 24 to outline plans for a software system that will make collecting, processing, and viewing the data easier. In 2003 the committee found the old forms inadequate by state ethics standards, said officials.

“The database would allow the committee and any interested citizen to find out about who is doing what, who is giving heavily, how much [the candidate] is raising and what percentage is coming from outside Brookline,” said Frank Farlow, the chair of the committee on Campaign Finance.

The state government implemented a similar system in 2004, according to the Massachusetts State Ethics Commission’s website.

“This isn’t something that’s new,” said Craig Bolon, the finance committee’s designated software developer. “It’s just about the same thing they’re doing all around the country.”

Nancy Daly, chair of the Board of Selectmen, said the new system seeks to make campaign financing sources more accessible and easier to understand.

This data system would increase the efficiency which the committee and the public can monitor campaign spending, but it will still not meet the primary objective of the committee, to restrict spending in campaigns, said Farlow.

Since 2004, the committee has researched the ethics and law behind limiting the amount campaigns can spend. According to the report released by the committee, selectmen races spend the most extravagantly.

“They are much more expensive than the other campaigns,” Farlow said. “It felt excessive and people who were able to raise the most [money] basically won.”

Since the Board of Selectmen rejected the committee’s proposal to allow it to limit campaign spending, the new software system to increase transparency in campaigns has been the committee’s only task at hand. It will be another two or three years before that system takes effect.

The committee began to meet less than a year ago. Composed of five Brookline residents, the town clerk or designee, and an appointee of the Board of Selectmen, the committee hopes its new software will help it to achieve its original goals.