By Philip Haldiman | The Arizona Republic
The results in last month’s primary for the Cave Creek Town Council seem to show that those candidates who spent money leading up to Election Day were rewarded with votes.
Of the six incumbents in the primary for council, only one — Thomas McGuire — received or spent enough to be required to file a campaign finance report during this election period, March 1-April 1.
McGuire is the only incumbent who made the ballot for the May 21 runoff.
However, the five challengers were active in the financing of their campaigns on various levels, with each filing campaign reports for this period. Most of them also received more votes than the incumbents in the primary.
Together they spent more than $15,000 this reporting period, compared with McGuire’s nearly $500.
Challenger Adam Trenk’s (Rose Law Group attorney) spending accounted for about two-thirds of candidate spending this period.
Statement by Trenk for Rose Law Group Reporter: “At first glance there seems like a large discrepancy in spending between the challengers and the incumbents during this campaign. However, in reality, the discrepancy tilts the other way because the publisher of the local tabloid paper dedicated his entire front page section and editorial pages to endorsement pieces for the incumbents and smear stories about the challengers.
‘These articles, which ran weekly, were essentially in-kind contributions to the incumbents, but are not required to be reported by the candidate’s campaign committees. If they were reported, the cash value of publishing and distributing those stories weekly would eclipse the money raised and spent by the challengers. “On the challengers end, the only way to counter speech is more speech, and so money was raised to fund the publication and distribution of mailers to counter the local tabloid’s campaign efforts.”
