Leander City Council Race - What Candidate Finance Reports Actually Show
(Hint: There is more to Leander elections than Andy Pitts.)
Remember the movie "Ground Hog Day" with Bill Murray where the main character wakes up only to find that he is repeating the same day over and over? Yesterday I felt that way about the Leander City Council election.
With the first week of Early Voting for the 2019 city council positions complete, the Hill Country News issued what could be described as a "hit piece" against some of the candidates in the Leander and Cedar Park elections using some of the same narrative used in the 2018 election.
In both cities candidates fall into two informal groups or slates. In Leander the challengers are endorsed by recently elected mayor Troy Hill and are seen as part of the 2018 changing of the guard that also elected Christine Sederquist and Marci Cannon. Kathryn Pantalion-Parker, Chris Czernek, and Jason Shaw are running with the endorsement of current Leander mayor Troy Hill. Jason Shaw has also received the endorsement of the Williamson County Republican Leaders organization, and Parker has received the endorsement of prominent Williamson County Republicans including Commissioner Cynthia Long and former Texas House Representative Tony Dale.
The Hill Country News article titled "Big money dominating local city council races", dated April 27, 2019, revived a theme from the 2018 mayoral campaign that accused the city council of being bought by Leander citizen Andy Pitts through the Texas Stronger PAC and other outside money. Travis Outrider researched those claims during the 2018 runoff election and found that while Texas Stronger PAC made a significant financial contribution to Hill, his opponent Villareal had received twice as much money as Hill with less than Hill's amount coming from Leander citizens. You could perhaps describe the claims as "fake news" or at least a campaign claim that did not hold up to facts and worthy of Pinocchio. (Reference: https://travis-outrider.blogspot.com/2018/05/.)
Based on research of the campaign finance documents available publicly on the city website, it appears we have another day but the same song. (Trivia: "I Got You Babe" by Sonny and Cher plagued Murray.) The facts show that although Texas Stronger did make significant contribution to those three candidates, they each received more donations from Leander citizens than their opponents. In fact all three received more contributions than their opponents even without the Texas Strong PAC donation. Apparently Pitts makes a great boogie man in campaign opposition pieces, but analysis shows that the three candidates he supports would be beating their opponents in donations in both dollars and citizen support without him.
Here is the breakdown of campaign contributions as currently posted on the city webpage. (Reference: https://www.leandertx.gov/citysecretary/page/elections2019)
Place
|
Candidate
|
Total
contributions
|
Leander
contributions
|
1
|
Parker*
|
$
9,570.00
|
10
|
1
|
Lantrip
|
$
2,325.04
|
2
|
3
|
Shaw*
|
$
9,415.04
|
10
|
3
|
Ross
|
$
646.00
|
2
|
5
|
Seiler
|
$
5,306.50
|
8
|
5
|
Czernek*
|
$
10,005.00
|
12
|
* Received $3000 from Texas Stronger PAC according to finance reports filed.
