The person I replied to mentioned about looking to where the financing was and I gave him a path to find it.
The unions being involved was brought up well before the Election Day. I don’t expect you to know that and I’m not going to waste the time explaining it to you. But on election night TempeWins was expecting to see it pass. Their final internal polling show the margin would be about the same as it ended up failing.
Now if you want to say “well then they got bad political advice, and their pollsters sucked.” then I’m in total agreement.
I like information and I am fine being wrong, so I was glad to see you provided me with a link. But before responding, I took the time to go through all the relevant documents at the Tempe campaign financing link you provided (ex-reporter brain) and didn't find anything close to "Work Force PAC" or millions of dollars.
The local Arizona Pipe Trades 469 funded $250k in expenditures through an LA-based Super PAC (basically just a mailing address) called Worker Power, which funneled that money primarily into digital marketing ad spend. That transfer happened on 4/13/2023. Is the assumption that more transfers happened prior but aren't documented anywhere?
The IE forms are for each little individual expenditure coming out of that $250,000 sum. Some are substantial, but most are little shit. Facebook/Meta Ads (like Google Ads) charge at intervals, so every $250 your account spends results in a unique credit card charge. Looks like a Facebook campaign with a daily budget between $500 and $1000. That generates a lot of big documents full of small transactions, but it's still a single $250,000 pool it pulled from.
That said, the money in those IE forms cumulatively exceeds $250k: There's $100k to one marketing firm, $25k to another, $125k late to "Radar Strategies." That's $250k alone right there, before you add in about $40k in total payments to canvassers, $10-15k total in printing (shirts and signs and direct mail I assume), and somewhere in the $10k range for Facebook ads (oh and they went to Costco a couple times). I didn't get the abacus out, but my skimming estimation of all 15 filed IE docs has it at around ~$320,000 in reported expenditures off $250,000 in funding, which is a bit vexing—but we're still a couple million short of a couple million here.
Meanwhile, documents at the link provided discredit Seravalli's reporting, which I'll resurface here:
Frank Seravalli said:
However, NHL sources indicated there has been a significant disparity in spending by Political Action Committees tied to both sides. The belief is the Coyotes side has spent less than $250,000 to activate the vote, opting for a bootstrap campaign, while the opposition has spent upwards of $2 million, backed by high-power labor unions who have not received a guarantee that they will be the ones building the project.
Oh, that's "the belief"? Because based on the documents at the linked local government portal: The "no" PAC had a whopping $34k. The pipefitters union's reported spend was $250k or $300k or whatever it was. And Meruelo's companies funded his "yes" PAC with over $1,000,000, of which at least $785,000 was disbursed. So if they "believed" they'd spent a third of the money that they did, they should have looked it up in the forms they filed. Now, if only $250k of that was direct campaign expenditure, hard to get all "woe is them" for wasting a lot of money and then blaming nebulous, undocumented "Cali union money."
Am I misreading something?
