Clean Elections, shady spending

When in doubt, hire bae … So many Agendas, so little time … And it’s poop again!

Democratic state Rep. Anna Abeytia won’t have to repay $54,000 of public money — at least for now — after she turned in a stack of documents at the last moment responding to the Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Commission’s audit of her campaign.

But the commission yesterday voted to continue investigating her, noting that there were a lot of suspicious red flags on her campaign spending and there’s “reason to believe she has violated multiple provisions of the Clean Elections Act and Rules.”

As a “Clean” candidate, Abeytia received $54,000 of public funds to run her 2024 campaign for the state House. In return, she had to follow the commission’s rules, including showing up to a debate, agreeing not to take money from major donors and undergoing an audit of her campaign finances.

But that last part has been a boondoggle.

A view of Abeytia’s missing campaign finance reports, as of last week.

For months, the commission has been trying to get her to file campaign finance reports showing how she spent the $54,000 in public funding for her campaign. The commission and its auditors have sent multiple letters and emails demanding that she comply and file the reports. In January, auditors got her on the phone and she promised to send documentation that evening.

Then she ghosted the auditors for another three months.

This week, she finally turned in four campaign finance reports, ranging from three to six months late.

“The mere fact that she has now filed additional reports that largely show large disbursements to a single consulting firm are not sufficient to satisfy Respondent’s burden, while the late filings after the course of action Respondent has undertaken supports the inference the reports are not in order,” Clean Elections Executive Director Tom Collins wrote in a memo to the commission.

And the reports she finally did file contained some obvious problems, commissioners noted yesterday.

Abeytia is engaged to Ricardo Serna, a political consultant who owns Gumption Consulting. (As we previously noted, Abeytia also voted to hire Serna as a landscaper for the Cartwright Elementary School District during her final days on the district’s governing board.)

The happy couple: Abeytia and Serna.

She paid Gumption nearly all of the $54,000 in public funding that she received for her legislative campaign.

It’s pretty much the only thing she spent her Clean Elections money on.

A quick overview of the state’s campaign finance system shows Serna has worked for a host of Democratic candidates, raking in at least $160,000 last year.

A view of some of the payments from political campaigns to Gumption.

While there’s no rule against hiring family members to work on your campaign, all receipts must be documented and properly broken down to show what kinds of work, exactly, was performed for the money.

Abeytia hasn’t provided any receipts.

At yesterday’s Clean Elections meeting, commissioners were clearly suspicious of her relationship with Serna and the vague line-items on her reports showing she paid him as much as $20,000 at a time for ambiguous reasons, like “Professional services – consulting.”

“So this was over a month and a half, about $48,000 that there's no explanation (for), just consulting services,” Commission Chairman Mark Kimble told her. “…And that just seems woefully inadequate to explain what the money was used for. And I couldn't help noticing that it was made to a consulting company that has the same address as you do. So I'm very puzzled about what exactly is going on here with large sums of money with no billing, no explanation, going to someone at your address.”

Abeytia said that the money was used for regular campaign stuff — mailers, canvassers and literature — and that her fiancé uses subcontractors and vendors, which is why the payments are lump sums and not broken down with any specificity in her reports.

But paying subcontractors without listing them is pretty clearly a violation of Clean Election rules, which state:

“In the event that a participating candidate purchases goods or services from a subcontractor or other vendor … the candidate’s campaign finance report shall include the same detail as required in A.R.S. § 16-948(C) for each such subcontractor or other vendor. Such detail is also required when petty cash funds are used for such expenditures.”

Abeytia told commissioners that Serna has worked for lots of candidates, and the way she reported her payments to him was no different than how others had.

That seems to be true, per our review of campaign finance reports.

But that doesn’t mean it’s OK.

In January, the Clean Elections Commission concluded an audit into Democrat Hector Jaramillo, who ran alongside Abeytia for the West Valley’s Legislative District 24. He lost in the primary to Democrat Lydia Hernandez.

But not before qualifying for $31,000 Clean Elections funding and spending it all with Gumption.

Clean Elections now audits every participating candidate in every election cycle, and Jaramillo’s audit came up with many of the same big red flags as Abeytia, including not providing receipts showing how he spent the money.

Now, Clean Elections is demanding he repay the full $31,760 that he received in public funding.¹

And the campaign finance enforcement agency is zeroing in on Serna. Among the documents commissioners are seeking are:

• All records … related to the engagement of and payments to any consultant … including Gumption Consulting and Ricardo Serna.

• All records … related to any purchases of goods or services from a subcontractor or other vendor through an agent, including Gumption Consulting and Ricardo Serna.

• All records … related to any goods or services provided by Gumption Consulting or Ricardo Serna.

The commission was set to vote yesterday to order Abeytia to repay the full $54,000 that she received in public funding this year, but it backed off after she finally filed campaign finance reports and responded to the auditors.

But that doesn’t mean the commission is done with her.

“I just want to make clear that all of us feel this is a very serious matter,“ Kimble told her, adding that the commission expects her full cooperation and hopes to resolve the issue at next month’s meeting. “It's not a minor oversight – a minor financial misunderstanding. It's a very serious situation, and I hope you understand that.”

Water is a huge issue in Arizona. But it’s hard to keep track of all the political maneuvering and technical issues, let alone understand the long history that leads up to the challenges that Arizonans face today.

That’s why we launched the Water Agenda earlier this year. It’s for regular people who want to understand the mechanics and politics of water, but haven’t spent the last decade getting a PhD in hydrology.

Here’s a bit from today’s edition by our resident water expert, Christian Sawyer:

“If you ever find yourself talking about water all the time like I do, you’ll quickly realize that our everyday conversation is filled with water-themed turns of phrase, and unintentional water puns are unavoidable.

Allow me to illustrate:

As we get closer to deadlines for Colorado River negotiations, news feeds will be flooded with headlines about upcoming water reductions. State water managers face sink-or-swim decisions as Lake Mead hovers near historic lows. If Arizona doesn’t want to be left high and dry, she’ll have to make some concessions among the basin states. The decisions Arizona made 80 years ago had a ripple effect and now we’re stuck with junior water rights. The ship has sailed on merely treading water, and now we’re in over our heads as solutions dry up and…

You get it.”

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Education is a lot like water. Everybody has a stake in it, but you really need to spend some time to understand the long list of power players and the huge sums of money at play.

And right now, the Trump administration has put education front and center in the culture wars.

The Education Agenda is your weekly cheat sheet on the big-time politics, and where those politics come home to roost: classrooms and school boards.

Here’s how veteran reporter Curt Prendergast kicked off Wednesday’s edition:

“School officials in Arizona have a serious deadline to meet tomorrow.

They were put in a tough spot when President Donald Trump told them to get rid of policies that promote diversity, equity and inclusion. Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne followed close behind, telling school districts that he considered DEI to be racial discrimination and they better do what Trump said.”

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Like education and water, artificial intelligence touches all our lives. But what sets it apart is the fact that it’s so new. Most people haven’t had enough time to wrap their minds around it. And when we don’t understand something, we tend to be a little afraid of it.

Every Thursday, the A.I. Agenda focuses on one corner of the vast world of AI and gives you an easily digestible introduction to a wave of technology that’s growing every day.

And, of course, the cast of characters in this drama is far goofier than you might expect.

Check out this guy (who’s now a millionaire) that our AI guru Adi Jagannathan highlighted in the latest edition:

“Two months ago, Columbia University undergrad‑turned‑dropout Chungin “Roy” Lee live‑streamed himself acing an Amazon coding interview while a secret browser window spoon‑fed him the answers.

The video went viral, Columbia suspended him, and naturally, venture capitalists showered his newborn startup, Cluely, with $5.3 million to help the rest of us ‘cheat on everything.’

Lee isn’t an outlier; he’s a preview.”

First of all, we would never encourage you to send boxes of poop to express your displeasure with politicians.

For legal reasons, we’re required to say that it’s immature, unsanitary and not cool.

However…

We did get a solid giggle out of this story from the Phoenix New Times’ Stephen Lemons about someone sending a bag of (alleged) poop to Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell.

Like the (probably fake) poop sent to her home, this story is chock full of nuttiness.

And Lemons packs in a lot of weird backstory — including by reaching out to the man Mitchell told police is her first guess at who would send her poop: local attorney Vladimir Gagic, with whom Mitchell and her husband have beefed extensively.

Gagic swears it wasn’t him. But also, you get the sense that the news made his day.

"She calls the cops for fucking fake poop. Really?" he asked. "Is that the best use of law enforcement resources in the county?"

1. Clean Elections has already issued a Repayment Order, though Jaramillo still has an appeals process he can go through.