Seven candidates running for borough office in November, including Commissioner Mingus Mapps, who is running for mayor of Portland, will not find out whether they received any taxpayer-funded campaign money until a day after the filing deadline.
That’s because Mapps and about six candidates running for one of Portland’s 12 City Council seats use donation-counting software that only provides weekly reports. Those reports are delivered on Wednesdays. Next Tuesday, Aug. 27, is the deadline for candidates to qualify for grants through the city’s Small Donor Elections program, which matches small donations at a ratio of up to 9:1.
This may explain why several cryptic emails from Mapps’ unsuccessful mayoral campaign landed in our inboxes last week. WW As previously reported, Mapps’ campaign was in debt this summer as it tried to regain its footing. Campaign finance filings show he still owes $15,000 to various vendors.)
In an Aug. 23 email, Collin Erickson, Mapps’ campaign manager, wrote that the campaign was still trying to confirm whether it had reached the 750 donors needed to release the $100,000 in matching contributions from the program.
“Today at 1:00 p.m., the program (Small Donor Elections) determined that we were a few donors short of meeting the requirements. “This is an ongoing process as we manually review our 1,100+ donations,” Erickson wrote. “We need to guarantee we reach 750 unique Portland donors by Tuesday afternoon. Please keep it up. We need to have 50 more donors, not 5 less.”
In an earlier email broadcast on August 15, Erickson wrote that Mapps’ campaign was just 21 donations away from reaching 750 donors and implored people to donate to the campaign.
Susan Mottet, director of the Small Donor Elections program, says Mapps won’t find out until Wednesday whether or not he released the $100,000.
“I don’t know why this hasn’t been an issue in previous election cycles, but I was informed this month that ActBlue is not showing people their donor information in real time. It only sends reports every Wednesday,” Mottet said in an email. “So we’re waiting for the Wednesday report of all contributions before we complete the official count, not just for Mapps but for a number of other candidates as well.”
In a phone call this afternoon, Erickson said Mapps’ campaign had received 754 individual donations since his last manual count Sunday evening, putting Mapps four donations over the threshold.
“I think we did it,” says Erickson.
Three other mayoral candidates, including frontrunners Rene Gonzalez and Carmen Rubio, both incumbent city councilors, have released $100,000 in grants. A third candidate, freight operator Keith Wilson, has also received $100,000 – the maximum amount available to mayoral candidates this election cycle.
According to an Aug. 17 email from Erickson, Mapps was barred from participating in a mayoral campaign hosted by the Progreso Latino PAC because he did not reach the 750 donor threshold. “While we did not participate in this debate,” Erickson wrote, “we are already confirming our participation in other debates.”
