here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n<\/aside>\nSilvafierro said finance reports indicate that many city candidates are “corporate-sponsored or are funded by the same 30 people.” Public financing, she wrote, “broadens the field of candidates and can turn anyone’s $10 into a $50 donation (according to this proposal). The more people we have participating (running and donating) in our democratic process, the better it is.”<\/p>\n
Las Cruces\u00a0doesn’t currently post campaign\u00a0finance reports online. They’re available from the city clerk’s office for a fee. While discussing whether there is\u00a0a need for public financing, Robert Mullan of Las Cruces said such reports should be online.<\/p>\n
“It should be required on the city website, full disclosure and all,” he said.<\/p>\n
‘I support having the discussion’<\/h3>\n
Mike Johnson said he believes public financing of elections\u00a0hasn’t helped in Santa Fe, where he lives. That’s\u00a0one of two cities in the state with\u00a0such a system in place.<\/p>\n
“My observations from the Santa Fe experiment is that the same usual-suspect power brokers and special interests still are in charge,” Johnson wrote.<\/p>\n
He\u00a0asked whether\u00a0Las Cruces would pay for the system through a tax increase or budget cuts. Johnson\u00a0also questioned\u00a0whether public financing\u00a0would effectively guarantee no special-interest money would influence campaigns.<\/p>\n
Las Cruces City Councilor Gregory Z. Smith called those “very much questions we need to ask ourselves.”<\/p>\n
“I support having the discussion,” Smith wrote. “How I vote will depend on what actually comes before us and how we answer those questions.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Is there a need for publicly funded elections in Las Cruces? Can the city afford it? Those were among the questions raised during discussions NMPolitics.net facilitated on Facebook about the proposal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":54908,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[145,705],"class_list":["post-65542","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-and-analysis","tag-las-cruces","tag-money-in-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65542","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65542"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65542\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54908"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65542"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65542"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65542"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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