The Mesa Tribune April 25 article Mesa Council incumbents lead campaign money race discusses the funding sources of Danny and the other four candidates for the Mesa City Council District 5 race. It shows that three of them are being supported with taking money from real estate developers, business interests and companies benefiting from City business and City approved building contracts.
The incumbent Alicia Goforth received $48,156 from Jan. 1 to March 31. $13,250 came from Political Action Committees (PACs). A real estate developer in Gilbert gave $7,031; a Mesa real estate investor gave $6,750 and his wife gave $2,000, and the CEO of Empire Cat, a business that makes money from providing machinery to construction projects in Mesa, gave $6,750 with his wife also giving $6,750. Other large donations came from an advisory firm; Real Estate interests and a land-use attorney. Essentially all are from business interests directly benefiting from decisions made by the City Council involving Ms. Goforth's approval.
Ryan Blakeman took in $25,950, mostly from the development community. His wife, Jamie Blakeman, serves on Mesa’s Planning and Zoning Board. Donors included land-use attorneys, CEO of commercial real estate Plaza Companies, architects and the president of a commercial real estate developer in Scottsdale.
Aleks Vranicic accumulated $23,943 for his campaign, which included $2,500 from The Freedom Club, the conservative republican PAC who only support “candidates who will fight for pro-growth, free market policies in Arizona”.
Based on the people supporting them, it's clear that these candidates are all going to support more and more construction, business and growth, regardless of whether that's good for the people.
The remaining two candidates, Danny Hart and Amanda Jones, were not required to file reports yet.
But Danny posts on his website that he "only accepts money from Individual U.S. Citizens and Permanent Residents from their personal funds. Contributions from trusts, corporations, limited liability companies, Political Action Committees (including AIPAC), Unions and anyone with business pending before the Mesa City Council are refused. Danny is running a grassroots community-funded campaign so that the PEOPLE of Mesa have more say than any special interests.” His campaign, being run entirely by volunteers, says that Hart has contributed his own money from $502 he received under the Arizona Property Tax Credit for low income senior citizen renters. Other than that, the campaign's largest donation is $25 so far.
It's pretty obvious who is interested in the welfare of actual residents of Mesa.
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