A Wauwatosa resident has filed state ethics complaints against the Wauwatosa School Board candidates who are running as the self-described “2030 Slate,” accusing the four campaigns of a series of finance violations, mostly related to the size of fund transfers between the aligned campaign committees and how they reported their coordinated campaign expenses, such as signs and mailings.
The three complaints, which resident Peter Baran filed by email March 28 with the Wisconsin Ethics Commission, cite as evidence the campaign finance disclosures filed last week with the Wauwatosa School District by three of the four 2030 Slate candidates: Chris Merker, Heather Birk and Dan Stemper. They are among eight candidates running for four School Board seats in the April 7 election.
Those three candidates’ campaign finance documents appear to report committee fund transfers that far exceed the amount allowed by state law; the maximum for Wauwatosa elections, based on the city's population, is just under $1,000. Baran also alleges that the campaigns’ signs, mailers and door hangers, which show all four 2030 Slate candidates’ names, represent in-kind donations between the campaigns that were not properly reported and should have counted toward the committee transfer limits.
The slate’s fourth candidate, Todd Koehler, is referenced in the complaints and in the other three candidates’ financial filings but was not directly accused by Baran of an ethics violation because he had not yet filed his own campaign finance disclosure. The deadline for the most recent filing period is March 30.
Baran provided copies of his three complaints to Tosa Forward News. All candidates' campaign finance reports are linked from this page on the Wauwatosa School District website.
Taken together, the 2030 Slate campaign finance disclosures so far indicate the four candidates coordinated to spend $12,225 on 310 yard signs featuring all four names, which were purchased by Stemper’s campaign committee. An additional $7,382 was spent on “campaign mailers” through Merker’s campaign committee and $1,444 on door hangers through Birk’s campaign committee.
Sharing the costs of campaign advertising is not prohibited, but campaigns must ensure their coordination does not exceed limits on campaign committee transfers, which mirror the limits on individual campaign donations.
“It just seems like pretty clear violations,” Baran said in a phone interview with Tosa Forward News when asked why he filed the complaints. Baran, who lives on North 104th Street in the Sheraton Lawns neighborhood, is an attorney who works for the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee as associate director of athletics for compliance and enrollment.
Baran said that early in the School Board race he had compliance concerns about the coordination he saw occurring among the 2030 Slate candidates, so he waited for the candidates to file their recent financial disclosures and was troubled by what he found.
“A lot of these rules are in place to prevent this sort of self-dealing,” he said. “These are folks that are running on a platform of financial transparency and financial management. It doesn’t necessarily seem like they have their own house in order.”
Tosa Forward News emailed each of the four 2030 Slate candidates individually for this story seeking responses to Baran’s complaints. Merker emailed back, copying the other three candidates, and pointed to a campaign Facebook post in which he had rebutted unidentified criticisms of the 2030 Slate spending $40 on each of its yard signs, something that Baran had not referenced in his formal complaints.
When pressed for comment about Baran’s ethics complaints, Merker said he had no further comments.
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Birk said by email that she had “nothing to add at this time.”
Koehler had not responded by the time this story was published.
Stemper responded by saying that he had contacted the Wisconsin Ethics Commission in January “to confirm the concept of sharing the cost of advertising between 4 candidates.” He also referenced an online document in which the commission offered past guidance to a different campaign asking similar questions about how to report joint expenditures that are shared by multiple campaigns.
“I used this document to the best of my ability to complete and file my campaign finance reports,” Stemper said.
That document, however, seems to confirm one of Baran’s central allegations — that each of the four campaigns, in addition to reporting its share of the joint campaign expenses, was required to report the other campaigns’ shares of those expenses as in-kind donations. Under those guidelines, for example, one-fourth of the $12,225 spent on signs would be counted as an expense, and the remaining three-fourths would be counted as an in-kind donation from the other three aligned campaigns.
"When candidate committees purchase a joint ad and share the cost of such ad, there is an exchange of in-kind contributions between the candidate committees for the portion they did not pay," the Ethics Commission says in the guidance cited by Stemper.