Longmont Fair Campaign Practices Act Longmont’s Fair Campaign Practices Act, which outlines contribution limits and establishes requirements for reporting campaign activity by local municipal candidates, issue committees and individuals or groups making independent expenditures during elections, can be viewed at tinyurl.com/ya826odo

One of the candidates in last year’s Longmont mayoral contest faces potentially having to pay $16,000 in fines, and a second has paid $200 in penalties, after exchanging complaints about alleged campaign finance reporting violations.

The time has come “to make significant changes” in Longmont’s Fair Campaign Practices Act, said Mayor Brian Bagley, who was fined $200 for violating provisions of that city elections code.

Sarah Levison, who’s been notified that she owes $16,000 in fines for alleged campaign finance reporting failures during her unsuccessful bid for mayor, said she’s wound up becoming “the test case” for how the code and its penalties for various kinds of violations are applied.

Bagley, the winner of the November 2017 race for mayor, has paid $200 in fines — $100 per violation, as set by the city code — for distributing two sets of materials last October that failed to state that those mailings were paid for by Bagley or his campaign committee.

Levison, a former City Council member, filed complaints on Dec. 28 with the Longmont City Clerk’s Office alleging Bagley’s violations.

City Clerk Valeria Skitt notified Bagley on Jan. 3 that she had concluded that he or his campaign committee had distributed electioneering communications “that did not contain the requisite information clearly stating that the communication was authorized and paid for by you or your committee.”

Bagley, in addition to paying his fines, made his own set of complaints about Levison’s campaign finance reports to the City Clerk’s Office on Jan. 9. He alleged that in a number of instances last fall, Levison had failed to meet city code deadlines for a candidate to file an “electioneering” report whenever incurring a cumulative expense of $250 or more on such campaign-related materials as flyers, handouts, stickers, banners, mailings and advertising.

The potential fine for each violation is $400 a day after the missed deadline for filing such an electioneering report, up to a maximum of $4,000 per violation, under the city code.

Skitt notified Levison last Friday that she’d concluded Levison had committed four violations of that electioneering reporting law, and that Levison was being fined $16,000 — $4,000 per violation — as the result.

Levison was given 14 days, starting last Friday, in which to either pay the fines or contest the city clerk’s conclusion that she had violated Longmont’s Fair Campaign Practices Act.

She said on Tuesday morning that she intends to contest Skitt’s decision and will request a hearing in Longmont Municipal Court.

Bagley said on Monday that rather than contest the $200 in fines for his printer’s failure to include what he called “the magic words” identifying who paid for the mailings, he decided to go ahead and pay them.

Levison said she’d filed her post-election complaints about Bagley’s campaign mailings after “people came to me and said, ‘What about this?'” She said she looked and had found Bagley mailings she’d received at her home that did not have the necessary “paid-for-by” language on them.

Levison, who was a member of the City Council that adopted the current update to the Fair Campaign Practices Act in 2011, suggested that technical violations of the city’s campaign finance reporting requirements might be found by examining reports made by other candidates for mayor and council in last year’s elections.

“I think you will find everyone has interpreted the code to the best of their abilities,” she said.

In Levison’s case, she said the electioneering expenditures that were the subject of Bagley’s complaints were included in her periodic pre-election reports of contributions and expenses, even if she did not file separate reports every time that kind of cumulative spending reached the thresholds for electioneering reports.

“The whole point” of the Fair Campaign Practices Act “is transparency,” she said, and “I did report everything.”

Bagley said he thinks the $16,000 in fines that Levison faces, if she loses her appeal, are one of the unreasonable features of Longmont’s Fair Campaign Practices Act — even if they’re the result of his complaints about her campaign reporting.

“Her violations are not worth $16,000 in fines,” he said.

Bagley said that rather than just promoting transparency in campaign finances, the current version of the city code instead has become “a political hammer” that candidates’ opponents use against them.

He said, “I want an overhaul” of the present law — one he suggested could preserve public reporting of campaign contributions and spending while removing what he called the current code’s “ridiculous, unconscionable, unreasonable and cumbersome” provisions.

Levison said she has not talked to Bagley about their dueling campaign-finance violation allegations. As for Bagley’s call for rewriting the city’s elections laws, she said: “Every once in awhile you have to update the code.”

Monday was the final day after the November election that Skitt could issue any notices of violations to candidates whose campaign-finance reports were the subject of formal complaints lodged with the clerk’s office. Skitt said she received no complaints about the reports filed by any of the other candidates running for mayor or City Council seats last year.

Contact Staff Writer John Fryar at 303-684-5211 or jfryar@times-call.com or twitter.com/jfryartc