Hession fined for late filings

Mayor Dennis Hession is being fined $500 for breaking state disclosure laws after a fundraiser last year, plus an extra $100 because he had a similar violation in a prior campaign.

Hession collected more than $5,000 at a fundraiser last year before he filed as a candidate, then missed a series of deadlines for announcing his campaign, depositing the money and reporting who gave it to him, the state Public Disclosure Commission ruled earlier this month. A record of that decision is being mailed to him this week.

The violations were unintentional, Hession said Wednesday, and a result of “not being in a campaign mode” when the money was raised. He won’t appeal the ruling.

In a brief hearing earlier this month, which Hession attended by telephone, commission Chairman Bill Brumsickle agreed with an agency investigator that the mayor’s campaign broke the rules for filing reports after Hession received more than $5,000 at what he described as a “spontaneous” fundraiser on May 24, 2006.

At the time, Hession had been appointed to the mayor’s post after Jim West was recalled by voters, but had not announced his plans to run for election. Friends were having a party to celebrate the 100th anniversary of their house, and people attending the party wrote him checks for his campaign, he said. He received a total of $5,425 from 35 contributors.

At that point, state law said he had two weeks to register as a candidate. He missed that deadline by five days.

He had one week to deposit the money in a bank account, and missed that deadline by 21 days.

He had a month to file reports that listed the names, addresses and occupations of the donors, and the amounts they gave, as well as a summary of what he raised and spent. He missed that deadline by 154 days, filing those reports in December.

Brumsickle fined Hession a total of $500 for those three violations, then reinstated a $100 fine that had previously been suspended. In May 2004, Hession was fined $200 for breaking rules for reporting contributions from his 2003 campaign for council president. But $100 of that fine was suspended under the condition that he not have a similar violation for two years.

That order was signed in June 2004, and it was in effect when the violations occurred in 2006, PDC investigator Kurt Young said.

“This was prompted by the fact that we weren’t in a campaign mode at all,” Hession said Wednesday in a telephone interview from Seattle, where he was scheduled to attend a fundraiser at the Harbor Club hosted by Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels. “We discovered (the failure to file) ourselves and got it reported before any other candidate announced.”

By the time he turned in his reports in December, he’d raised an additional $1,200, and spent about $2,300.

But the reporting violations did not go unnoticed. A complaint was filed early this year by Donna McKereghan, a Logan Neighborhood activist and government watchdog who is running against Bob Apple for a seat on the City Council. That triggered the PDC investigation.

Initially, his campaign treasurer was an accountant who was unfamiliar with PDC rules, Hession said. He has since hired a treasurer with campaign reporting experience.

Asked how he could have a new round of campaign reporting violations after being fined in 2004, Hession contended that was a sign that the violation was inadvertent.

“Having known that there would be people out there that would be scrutinizing us (shows) we didn’t do it intentionally,” he said.