Oakland Council set to increase campaign contribution cap for three years, saying the limit isn’t fair to candidates

The Oakland City Council approved a proposal Tuesday to temporarily increase contribution limits for candidates in the upcoming election. 

The proposal, introduced by council members Janani Ramachandran and Kevin Jenkins, neither of whom is up for reelection this year, raises the maximum allowed contributions by $200 from individual donors and by $300 from political committees. 

“We want to let candidates control their own narrative without having to rely on expensive, independent expenditures that have already been … impacting these elections,” Ramachandran said.

The proposal sets the new limits at $800 for individuals and $1,500 for political committees until 2027, when the old limits return. It passed its first reading Tuesday with a 5-2 vote. Council President Nikki Fortunato Bas and Councilmember Noel Gallo cast the only votes against the proposal.

Gallo, who is running for reelection, said he was primarily concerned with the timing of the change, which at the soonest, would go into effect just over three weeks before Election Day. Bas said she had concerns that the change could disproportionately benefit candidates with strong relationships with wealthy donors, echoing predictions made by leaders of the Public Ethics Commission, a political watchdog group.

The council will vote on the legislation again on Monday, after a second reading, per city policy, before it can go into effect. The earliest the measure would be implemented is Oct. 14. 

Proponents argue the change can help close a funding gap for candidates. But critics — including leaders of Oakland’s Public Ethics Commission and nonprofit political organizations like Oakland Rising — worry that increasing contribution limits so close to the election would unfairly benefit candidates with strong wealth networks.

“Last-minute changes to the campaign finance system should be avoided absent extremely compelling reasons,” Nicolas Heidorn, executive director of the PEC, and Alex Van Buskirk, lead analyst for the commission, wrote in a September report. “The proposal would likely advantage candidates connected to networks of wealth over community-supported candidates.”

Heidorn and Van Buskirk’s report recommended that PEC staff oppose the proposal.

Delays with ‘Democracy Dollars’

Contribution limits were dropped to their current levels — $600 for individuals and $1,200 for broad-based committees — after the passage of Measure W in 2022. The measure was also supposed to establish “Democracy Dollars,” a government voucher program to help fund local campaigns. But due to the city’s budget shortfall, full implementation of the program has been delayed. Democracy Dollars costs $4 million to implement. Ramachandran and Jenkins’s proposal raises contribution limits to just below their pre-Measure W levels.

Without the Democracy Dollars program, Ramachandran and Jenkins said, Measure W’s lowered contribution limits created a funding gap for candidates. 

In their report, Heidorn and Van Buskirk said that in Oakland, most money for candidates comes from large donors — those who give at least $500 to a candidate. Over the past three election cycles, a third of donors were considered large donors, and two-thirds of the total money raised came from large donors. This trend could be exacerbated by a last-minute increase in contribution limits, Heidorn and Van Buskirk said. They also cautioned that with the commission’s own lack of funding and sparse staffing, a change in election laws so close to the ballot boxes opening would divert critical resources to educate candidates on the change.

Jenkins dismissed Heidorn and Van Buskirk’s projection as “speculative.”

“What really matters for me is people getting their message out. How they choose to get their message out is not a concern to me,” Jenkins said. “Some people will give you more than others, but that is not indicative of who you will serve and whose interest you’ll serve.”

Democracy Dollars is not Oakland’s only public financing program for candidates. When the program was postponed, the city reinstated the Limited Public Financing, or LPF, program, which offers candidates reimbursements for some campaign expenses. But this election cycle, the program’s resources are limited, with only roughly $150,000 allocated. In the November 2022 election cycle, the program had over $20,000 more. Ramachandran said that candidates this season are eligible to receive less than half of what she was eligible for in her campaign in 2022.

“It’s imperative that there’s a funding source that is long term that is found,” Jenkins said. “Without it, [Democracy Dollars] is not going to be implemented.”

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