Leticia Van de Putte has dropped a fundraising bomb on the San Antonio mayor’s race.

Van de Putte has emptied her lieutenant-governor and state-senator campaign accounts and dumped the entire amount — approximately $300,000 — into her mayoral coffers.

This is big news, given the city’s severe limits on individual donations. No San Antonio mayoral candidate is allowed to accept more than $1,000 from an individual or entity per contribution cycle.

Van de Putte’s campaign has attempted to get around that restriction by shifting money in $500 increments from her state campaigns to the mayoral account, with each contribution in the name of a contributor to the state accounts.

Unlike the city, the state of Texas has no restrictions on individual contribution amounts. While the majority of Van de Putte’s state contributions were $500 or under, there have been some high-dollar exceptions, such as a $65,000 contribution to her lite-guv campaign last October from Planned Parenthood.

This is strange new terrain for municipal races.

We have no history in San Antonio politics of state lawmakers or candidates for statewide office abruptly deciding to run for a municipal seat, and being compelled to navigate the sharp differences in fundraising law.

When former state Rep. Mike Villarreal entered the mayor’s race last year, he also zeroed out his state account. But when he transferred contributions to his municipal campaign, he did so by writing checks to his donors for the difference between their contribution and the $1,000 limit. (For example, in the case of a $5,000 contribution, he would return $4,000 to the contributor, and transfer the remaining $1,000 to his mayoral account.)

Van de Putte’s competitors were critical of the way she transferred her campaign funds.

“This is a very complicated method intended to hide the fact that Leticia is breaking the law,” Villarreal said. “The city’s campaign finance law is clear. If Leticia is willing to flagrantly break the law to get elected, what can we expect from her if she wins office?”

Mayor Ivy Taylor provided the following statement: “Whatever Leticia Van de Putte chooses to do with her multiple campaign accounts is up to her. It’s up to her to explain to her donors what she is doing with their money. My donors know their money is going to help me run for only one office and that is mayor of San Antonio.”

The harshest response came from Colin Strother, a consultant who is running the campaign of former Bexar County Commissioner Tommy Adkisson.

“It’s a money laundering scheme,” Strother said. “It’s disguising the origination of contributions and attributing them to people it wasn’t neccessarily from.”

Van de Putte’s campaign recently sent out letters to her past contributors, informing them that Van de Putte wanted to use $500 from their state-campaign contributions in her race for mayor. The letter asked those contributors to contact the Van de Putte campaign if they objected to their contributions being used in the municipal race.

Christian Archer, who assumed the helm of Van de Putte’s campaign a month ago, dismissed the criticism of her fundraising move.

“They have a right to their opinions,” Archer said. “They don’t have a right to make up their own facts, and that’s all they’re trying to do right now. We’re following the letter of the law, we sought mulitiple opinions, and we are following exactly what those opinions recommended to us.”

The City Code does not address the particulars of Van de Putte’s fundraising move. It does state, however, that if a candidate moves from another campaign to a municipal race, the candidate “may maintain the same campaign account,” but “shall return all contributions in excess of the limits for the municipal office sought.”

The city attorney’s office did not respond to a request for an opinion on the issue, but former City Attorney Michael Bernard said that he saw no problem with Van de Putte’s strategy.

“As long as you attribute it to contributors within the (municipal) limits, you’re okay,” said Bernard, a long-time friend of Archer. “You can’t move it in a block, you can’t do it willy-nilly.”

With one stroke, Van de Putte has infused her campaign with more money than Julián Castro spent for his entire 2013 race (when, admittedly, he had no major challengers). If she makes it to a runoff, she won’t lack for a war chest.

ggarcia@express-news.net