General Assembly candidates aided with in-kind donations

By Matt Dooley
Production Coordinator
Published: January 9, 2008

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) - Not all giving in Virginia’s most expensive legislative election season was done in cash, nor was it done with a partisan edge in mind.

For hundreds of advocacy groups for businesses, professions and ideologies, doing favors for friendly candidates - usually incumbents - was business as usual.

About $11 million of the record $67 million given to House and Senate candidates in this year’s elections were “in-kind” donations: mailings supporting a candidate or opposing his opponent, footing the bill for a fundraiser, television ads and the like.

Most of it, about $8.4 million, was in-kind donations from partisan political action committees: Democrats determined to win control of the state Senate; Republicans trying - and failing - to keep it. The rest came from sectors of the economy not directly tied to political parties or partisan leaders.

The findings come from campaign finance reports filed last week and compiled into a computer database by the Virginia Public Access Project, a nonprofit and nonpartisan tracker of cash in state politics.

In-kind aid from outside of party PACs is part of the cost of doing business with legislators, and the beneficiaries are overwhelmingly incumbents.

The Virginia Association of Realtors, for example, made 31 in-kind donations the last four weeks of the campaign totaling $136,124 to 30 different legislators, all but one of them incumbents.

“They’re known quantities,” said John R. Broadway Jr., a lobbyist for the Realtors. “You can often tell about a candidate’s views from surveys and questionnaires, but if you work with a legislator on issues - for or against - over a period of years, you come to know them.”

“As with any endeavor, you feel more comfortable with who you work with,” Broadway said.

The most expensive favor was nearly $25,000 for mailings and postage for Republican Sen. Jeannemarie Devolites Davis, whose unsuccessful re-election campaign raised $1.9 million, the most of any candidate this year.

Realtors and developers, among the most monetarily powerful lobbies in Richmond, find themselves battling efforts to brake suburban growth, particularly in northern Virginia.

The industry this year hopes to remove “proffers,” or payments some localities require developers to make before building new homes. While cities and counties argue that they help maintain the services new home developments require, many in the industry argue that proffers amount to extortion and drive up housing costs by tens of thousands of dollars.

The Virginia Hospital and Healthcare Association gave nearly $13,000 over the final month to four incumbents, including Democratic Sen. Charles J. Colgan. Without his narrow victory in a Republican-leaning Prince William County district, Democrats would not have achieved their majority of 21 seats in the 40-member Senate.

Hospitals have battled in recent legislative sessions about care for the uninsured, but the April 16 massacre at Virginia Tech puts a new problem - care for the mentally ill - in the spotlight, said the organization’s lobbyist, Katharine M. Webb.

“Eighty-five percent of all the commitments - temporary detention orders - done in this state are sent to Virginia hospitals. That means we have a dog in this fight,” Webb said.

A mentally troubled student, Seung-Hui Cho, shot 32 people to death at Virginia Tech before killing himself last spring. The slayings exposed Virginia’s crippled mental health services and thrust the crisis to the forefront of 2008 legislative issues.