Group funding PUD candidates may be breaking law

Grant County — Advocacy group Ag Power Users of Grant County, which has contributed around $56,000 in total to candidates for Grant County Public Utility District commissioner elections, may be violating public disclosure laws by withholding information about the group’s donors.

Public disclosure laws regarding non-profit organizations are murky, with myriad exemptions that allow groups to withhold donor information by avoiding classification as a political committee. If a non-profit organization has a broad purpose it only partially fulfills by electioneering, than it can currently skirt disclosure requirements, according to interpretations of case law by the state Public Disclosure Commission.

Documents filed by the group when it was created in 2009 state the group’s purpose is “Represintation (sic) on power issues in Grant Co. P.U.D.,” which would on its face allow the group to avoid classification as a political committee required to disclose its donors.

However, the group may have lost its ability to legally avoid disclosure by soliciting donations for explicitly political purposes. In a flyer produced by the Ag. Power Users of Grant County in 2017 and posted to social media again in April, the group solicits donations from its members and the general public. In the social media post, the group indicated that it works to “make sure all of our community members (sic) interests are considered in PUD rate planning,” and suggests that this is best accomplished through electoral politics.

“Thus, the best opportunity for us to assure our mutual interests are not ignored, is to elect candidates that will advocate for all of us for PUD Commissioner,” the post reads.

According to PDC guidelines, this may qualify as a “special solicitation” that would require the group to disclose its donors publicly, said Kim Bradford, communications and outreach director for the PDC.

“If they went out to even just their members and said ‘we want to support these candidates, we want to support these ballot measures, give us money above and beyond what you usually give us so we can do these things,’ that would probably prompt a committee registration requirement,” Bradford said.

When the Columbia Basin Herald reached out Tuesday to Ag Power Users of Grant County president Travis Meacham for comment, Meacham said that a previous conversation with the PDC had confirmed that the group was not required to disclose information about its donors. Meacham declined to allow the Herald to look at the group’s finances, but said he would contact the PDC to confirm the advocacy group’s status.

However, Meacham said Wednesday that he had not spoken in the last 24 hours with the PDC to confirm Ag Power Users was currently following the law, instead reiterating his earlier statement that the group had been told by the PDC four weeks ago that disclosure was not required. Meacham again declined to give any information about the group’s donors to the Herald.

“The formation of Ag Power Users was not to become political in the direction of the PUD but to help the PUD understand our concerns,” Meacham read from a prepared statement. “In our talks with the PDC, we were told that the nature of our organization did not require us to become registered as a political action committee, but still gives us a chance to support candidates who recognize our needs.”

However, case law used by the PDC to guide its regulation of political committees states that: “if the evidence indicates that one of the organization’s primary purposes was electoral political activity during the period in question, and the organization received political contributions as defined in the Act, then the organization was a political committee for that period and should comply with the appropriate disclosure requirements.”

Even if the PDC does not find a violation, groups like Ag Power Users will not be able to deny public access to its donor lists in future elections. The almost-exclusive ability of non-profits to avoid disclosure has recently been addressed by the state legislature, which passed a law earlier this year that would require any organization to register as an ‘incidental committee’ required to publicly disclose its donors if that non-profit contributes more than $25,000 to political endeavors in a single election cycle.

This new regulation will not take effect until mid-2019, making this the last election in which the Ag Power Users group could have avoided disclosure laws in this way. By soliciting donations specifically for a political campaign, however, the Public Disclosure Commission may find that the group is currently in violation of the law.