Motion: Establish and Fund a Campaign Support Fund (Special Fund)

[Amanda Gibbs]

I may be mistaken but I thought this initially started with trainings per the original post “The intent of this Special Project Plan is to raise funds for the purpose of training and supporting LPTexas Staff, candidates and other campaign volunteers.” but it seems candidate focused $$ thing is all that’s being discussed. I strongly believe training is and should be the focus because with proper training donor dollars will be utilized in a purposeful and strategic manner.

 

[John Wilford]

Ana and I spent a good amount of time digging through the history of this account last night. I don't have time to line it all out as I'm at work. Hoping one of us will have time later today.

Just to follow up on this. It looks like this account was originally created for our PTYCORP account. For anyone unfamiliar with TEC requirements, we can take corporate donations and use them on a limited number of things but they are not managed by the GPAC which is what all of the rest of our funds are they are managed under a PTYCORP which by election code the Chair is the treasurer for, not our elected treasurer, they also must be kept in a separate bank account. I managed this account in 2016 while there were funds in it, that were collected at the 2016 convention. We spent those on our virtual office space, which got us a mailing address, a receptionist who would direct our calls, and a physical office we could rent once a month in Austin. Once all the PTYCORP funds were used, we reallocated them to what we called the supplemental account and brought it under the GPAC. I've been able to verify this was the same account because Melina Bakers treasurer reports included the account numbers on them and you can see where it changed but the account number stayed the same. From there you can see where the balance goes up and down for a little while but couldn't find any rhyme or reason to what was driving it. I also looked at some old SLEC meeting streams and couldn't figure it out from there either. Unfortunately, the forums from that time were lost when we switched to discourse, so I can't see what was going on there. I don't know for sure what it was used for, but I have the faintest memory that it may have been used as the account our debit cards were tied to, and we kept a smaller amount of money in as a protective measure, but I don't know for sure.

 

[John Wilford]

When this fund was initially discussed, there was no intent to provide funding directly to candidates. If you would like to donate to a candidate, then feel free to donate directly to them. The intent of this fund is to focus on providing training and state wide resources to support candidates. There should be a new motion going up with the language changed to remove the direct donations to candidates.

Yeah, sorry, it may be best to start a new thread on the topic. I know when Jessie first called me before making the motion to discuss TEC and FEC requirements the subject was brought up and has been brought up here. We kinda slipped into discussing the side bar, which I do think needs to be discussed, but this is probably not the optimal place to do that for the sake of clarity and staying on track.