Doug Turner (Photo by Heath Haussamen)
Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Turner doesn’t have plans to release a campaign finance report to the public until the next one is required on April 12 – but he’s also not entirely closing the door on doing it sooner.
“I would imagine we’ll report in April when it’s appropriate,” Turner told NMPolitics.net’s Peter St. Cyr earlier today.
Turner was speaking at a tax protest outside the Roundhouse that he held with former Gov. Gary Johnson.
“Maybe we’ll do it earlier,” Turner said of releasing a finance report. “You know, we haven’t had a plan. Today our focus is on fighting taxes.”
Meanwhile, three other gubernatorial candidates — Democrat Diane Denish and Republicans Susana Martinez and Janice Arnold-Jones — have already gone beyond what the law requires in terms of campaign finance transparency, and Republican candidate Pete Domenici Jr. says he plans to join them.
“We don’t have any resistance to that,” Turner said of releasing reports more often than the law requires. “It’s just that we haven’t been focusing on following every single campaign on, you know, who’s proving that they’re more transparent than the other.”
“I have started off this campaign acknowledging from the beginning that I’m self-funding a significant portion of it, and I will continue to self-fund significant portions of it even while I’m raising money,” Turner said. “I’m raising money from oil and gas industry. I’m raising money from businesses that care about the future of this state. And when we report, we’re going to report and everyone will know about it.”
You can listen to Turner’s comments here:
The other candidates
Denish has been voluntarily releasing reports quarterly — even in off-election years when it’s not required — for some time, and she did it again last week. Martinez matched Denish last week in voluntarily releasing a report of contributions and expenditures for the fourth quarter of 2009.
Arnold-Jones has gone well beyond that in terms of disclosure of campaign contributions. She recently posted on her campaign Web site information about every contribution she’s received to date, and she is keeping the list of contributions current.
But unlike Denish and Martinez, Arnold-Jones has not been releasing information about campaign expenditures more often than state law requires.
Domenici, who entered the race over the weekend, plans to voluntarily release information about contributions at least monthly, his spokesman says.
Only Turner and Republican Allen Weh haven’t agreed to go beyond what the law requires. Weh hasn’t answered the question about whether he’ll voluntarily release a campaign finance report this month.