When Running for City Council How Optional is Optional? It all depends.

One of the first things a candidate for elected office in California needs to do is file a California Fair Political Practices Committee (FPPC) Form 410. Unfortunately government bureaucracy in its infinite wisdom has deemed it fit to leave a form that clearly states Optional for fax/email address while adding instructions that have been updated to state that an email address is required.

Generally, I am a person who because I believe that privacy is a right does not complete anything in any form that is not required. (Sometimes I even won’t complete a form because of some of the required entries but that is a post for another time.) So when I had to complete the required FPPC form 410 I left fields that were not required blank, only to have my application “denied” and returned for completion. Denied. Really? Couldn’t they say incomplete? Couldn’t they call me and get the necessary missing questions answered? No, the form was denied among others but primarily because I had not completed an optional no longer optional field: the aforementioned campaign email address. Good news after much back and forth, I finally got my FPPC number just in time to make the September advertising deadlines.

Another optional but not so optional form included a Fair Practices Ethical Form for filing with the City Clerk basically a form that said I would be an ethical candidate. I would have thought that was implied. But maybe I should not have been shocked. The reality however is that signing that form was optional. Following my own internal rule I should not have signed. But not signing would have been interpreted by the press and maybe even the public as maybe meaning that I was unethical. Did I want my campaign to become about whether or not I was ethical? Instead of what I would have meant by not signing which was that that was implied and unnecessary? I signed and submitted the form.

Then all of a sudden it was brought to my attention that I wasn’t a very well known candidate and that I needed publicity, any publicity to get my name out there. Maybe I should not have signed and had the press write articles about how the candidate for Transparency in Government hadn’t been willing to sign essentially a voluntary pledge to be ethical. What a conundrum this running thing is. But it was too late to consider that, I had already signed.

I wonder what the next optional but not really optional issue will end up tripping my campaign for City Council up.