Local Dark Money: Citizens United Meets Main Street

My updated free ebook on dark money infesting local elections is here

Four years ago I compiled my political committee research into an e-book, Local Dark Money: Citizens United Meets Main Street. The information was an eye opener for many friends and neighbors. Many readers had no idea how much money was being spent by special interests to ensure City and County governments were friendly to them. These donors are primarily development interests looking for their projects to be rubber stamped. It has only gotten worse. You can access my updated free e-book by clicking on this link or the linked title above.

These days more dark money managers are active in Sarasota and Manatee local elections. One particularly notorious political consultant and PAC manager, Anthony Pedicini, is a partner at the firm SIMWINS. Since February 2020, SIMWINS has received payments from state candidates and political committes totalling over $33 million dollars for political consulting, mailers and other services. I say notorious because Pedicini worked to elected a slate of new County Commissioners in Manatee County in 2020, and most of those elected (with the exception of George Kruse) are widely considered to be the worst Commissioners that Manatee County has ever seen. Joe McClash of the Bradenton Times has written a great piece on this, and how the local GOP has got to clean up its act (all of these problematic Manatee County Commissioners are Republicans).

This same political consultant, Anthony Pedicini, has been hired by Teresa Mast and Neil Rainford, who are running for Sarasota County Commission. Mast and Rainford are refusing to appear at candidate forums. They don’t think they have to appear. This has been a trend with local candidates who have deep pocketed donors bundling $1000 donations via various LLCs and family. Affiliates of Pat Neal, Randy Benderson, Carlos Beruff and Rex Jensen are contributing large sums to these candidate campaigns and their political committees.

Local dark money became an important factor in our local politics a few years after the 2010 Citizens United decision. As one former Sarasota County School Board member said in 2015, you used to be able to run for School Board with a campaign budget of about $10,000. In 2020, incumbent Eric Robinson had a put a quarter of a million dollars into his school board race ($30,000 was from the local teacher’s union). Yes. A quarter of a million dollars. For a School. Board. Race.

I’ll be giving a presentation on Local Dark Money this coming Wednesday, July 24th at 5:30 pm the Fruitville public library. This meeting is sponsored by Sarasota Citizens Action Network. Please come on out, meet your neighbors and learn how political committees are operating in our local elections!