Chula Vista City Attorney Glen Googins requested the City Council form an ad-hoc committee to work with his office to develop and provide recommendation by the council regarding updates to the city’s Campaign Contribution Ordinance (Municipal Code chapter 2.52) to assure conformance with applicable laws.
“This is an item that has been nagging at me and I believe a number of you for some time,” said Googins. “It seems that other priorities get in the way with how busy we are with all the factors going on in the city. There really is no convenient time to make this update. We are either going into an election cycle or coming out of one.”
Googins said with his term coming to an end there were a number of things he wants to get to Council, in this case to take up some necessary and appropriate issues in the campaign ordinance.
“My goal in this is many fold,” he said. “There are some ambiguities in this that have come up from time to time that ought to be addressed. I think we have had a number of prime examples with the enforcement mechanisms that might warrant a look and maybe eventual tuning of that system. I am interested in developing some mechanisms for candidates to seek interpretations, if not advice, then determinations on how the campaign contribution ordinance applies to them as opposed to having make guesses because I can not currently advise them on how to face complaints where violations might be inadvertent.”
Googins said the committee would pick up any matters that the Council, or the ad-hoc committee deems appropriate to update the ordinance, then do this periodically for a thorough review from a legal standpoint.
“There are a few cases and statutes that come out time to time that warrant a look at,” he said. “I am proposing this in open session as ultimately it is your decision of what this ordinance says. My idea would be to convene that subcommittee as soon as within the next 30 days to get recommendations to present back to the city council, hopefully by the end of this calendar year.”
Googins requested that Mayor Mary Casillas Salas and Council member Steve Padilla join the committee as they have been through many elections, have a collective of different experiences, and neither of them are currently running for a local city council seat or office.
Salas moved for approval of a council subcommittee for the purpose of looking at the campaign ordinance and the formation of an ad hoc committee and recommend herself and Padilla be part of the ad-hoc committee as part of the motion. It passed unanimously.
