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LA Unified school board President Richard Vladovic
LA Unified school board President Richard Vladovic’s campaign today filed an ethics complaint against one of his challengers in the school board race for District 7.
Vladovic’s complaint to the City Ethics Commission charges Euna Anderson with failing to report campaign contributions in a timely fashion, in compliance with the California Political Reform Act.
A section of the act requires that committees report within 24 hours the receipt any contribution of $1,000 or more that comes within 90 days of the election, which in this case, is scheduled for March 3.
Vladovic’s complaint cites four contributions of $1,090 made to Anderson’s campaign since Dec. 4. The section of the City Ethics website that lists “24-Hour Reports for Contributions” does not include anything from Anderson’s campaign since Dec. 4. However, Anderson did report the donations in this accounting of total funds for the fourth quarter of 2014.
“The evidence speaks for itself,” Mike Trujillo, Vladovic’s campaign consultant told LA School Report. “And this should be a warning that we’re going to scrub every single penny that goes in her coffers now. To make this many errors, either she doesn’t know what she’s doing or she doesn’t care, but either one is very troubling if you’re trying to run for the largest school district in California.”
Anderson is one of two people challenging Vladovic for the District 7 board seat. The other is Lydia Gutierrez.
The Anderson campaign did not respond to a request for a comment about the allegations, and LA School Report was unable to reach a spokesperson with the City Ethics Committee.
Jay Wierenga, communications director for the state Fair Political Practices Commission, which is responsible for enforcing the Political Reform Act, explained that the state may or may not investigate a complaint filed with the city of Los Angeles.
“We work closely with any cities or counties that have ethics commissions, but
it depends what the local ethics commissions want to do,” he told LA School Report. “In some cases, we generally would like to let locals handle local stuff as much as possible, but we can and will investigate a lot of the times in conjunction with the local officials.”
Wierenga said he had not seen the specific Vladovic campaign complaint, but said penalties for violating the act range from a warning letter to a fine of $5,000.
“I don’t think we would categorize any violation of the Political Reform Act as any more egregious or less egregious,” he added. “The law is the law.”
Vanessa Romo contributed to this report