FPPC launches investigation into Mountain View’s firefighter PAC

Landlord lobby funnels money into Mountain View City Council race directly and through firefighters

by Kevin Forestieri / Mountain View Voice

Uploaded: Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 1:51 pm

Flyers sent out in Mountain View for local, state and federal races on the Nov. 3 ballot. Photo by Magali Gauthier.

State election officials launched an investigation Thursday into the Mountain View Fire Fighters Political Action Committee (PAC) following a complaint that the organization has been on a spending spree supporting City Council candidates in violation of campaign finance laws. Records show the state’s powerful landlord lobby is helping fund the firefighters’ campaign spending.

The firefighters PAC has sent mailers and flyers to residents in support of three candidates — Margaret Abe-Koga, Lisa Matichak and Jose Gutierrez — throughout October, one of which touts that all three support Measure C and “full funding” for public safety. But the campaign committee has not reported these mailers as large independent expenditures, nor do the mailers themselves disclose that they are being paid for by an independent committee.

The back of an election mailer sent out by the firefighters PAC in support of its preferred slate of candidates.

The latest campaign filings also reveal that the firefighters PAC has taken money from the California Apartment Association (CAA), a landlord lobbying group, though the exact nature of the contribution is unclear. The assistance from CAA is unusual for the local PAC, which has historically been funded through Mountain View firefighters and supported candidates for state office. It’s also the latest in a string of aggressive independent expenditures in Mountain View this election season, with the bulk of outside money being spent on misleading attack ads against candidate and former Assemblywoman Sally Lieber.

Except that Alex Lee has consistently voted to exacerbate the affordable housing crisis.

My daughter is a teacher too. No, she could not afford to buy a house in Saratoga where she grew up, and she is under no illusion that there is some reason or mandate that everyone should be able to buy a house where they grew up regardless of their income. You buy or rent where you can afford.

Exactly. The end of the California Republican Party, with all of its nutcases like Kevin McCarthy, Darrel Issa, etc., has rendered them irrelevant.

It didn’t used to be that way. We had sane Republicans like Tom Campbell (though he caved to the enormous pressure to vote for the Clinton impeachment). We had decent Republican governors like Pete Wilson and George Deukmejian, and even Arnie was not horrible.

Having met both Teresa Keng and Kansen Chu, and seeing how Lan Diep voted as a San Jose City Council member, and looking at Alex Lee’s dismal record as an Assembly Member, especially in the area of affordable housing, Teresa Keng gets my vote.

Proposition 13 radically restrained property tax revenues to local and state governments and presaged four decades of public sector retrenchment not least of which was the undermining of the California Master Plan, the unparalleled public post-secondary system of education established in 1960. That system provided tuition-free education to anyone seeking it and was a major contributor to California’s prosperity and social mobility for decades. At the same time, Proposition 13 resulted in windfall profits for the largest real property owners in the state, including apartment owners (https://www.ucop.edu/acadinit/mastplan/mpsummary.htm; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Master_Plan_for_Higher_Education).

In order to prevail in the class war and to enable greater material returns in a mature, predatory capitalist system, property and capital owners must control the state at all levels. That state is the source of subsidies, revenues and favorable rules and regulations that are essential to profits. The question is: what do we do as a community to defend ourselves from such inimical power?

One front in the struggle is to elect leaders Alex Lee who take no funds from corporate PACs and who stand for using public resources to actually improve the living conditions of common working people. This includes affordable housing policies. Electing clean leaders with people-centered campaigns and governance agendas is, of course, not the only–nor the most powerful–tool in fighting the power of business elites. More important is to continue to develop the manifold ways of organizing popular will and popular resistance to the dangerous powers arrayed against a just and sustainable future.

Obviously you are a benefactor of prop 13, which allows old timers to rob the next two generations of the funds they need to support the social structure you get to enjoy at their added expense, whilst you sit on your huge equity and don’t move because you can’t afford to. Prop 19 will fix that

And the progressives are the ‘lesser of the evil’ vote? Don’t fool yourself and think they don’t have their own ‘religion’ and ‘god’ that they follow…

Neither Matt Mahan nor Dev Davis respect property rights – both of them are running for mayor on campaigns that promise stopping the state from stopping cities from stopping property owner’s from exercising their rights. If they really cared about property rights then they would support SB9, but they want a society where some people have the right to decide what other people can or can’t do with their property.