Spending low for school-board candidates

For the 2012 election, the presidential candidates have raised nearly $1 billion each. Congressional candidates average into the low millions.

But some Peoria Unified school-board candidates competing for three seats in the Nov.6 election raised less than $500.

The top fundraiser, board incumbent Eddie Smith, totaled $3,019 with money rolled over from his 2010 election campaign. Incumbent Joe McCord raised more than $2,000.

All figures are based on the Sept. 27 campaign-finance filing. The latest figures won't be available until later this week.

Most of the cash has gone to the usual campaign expenditures, such as signs, fliers and robocalls.

Despite low donations and spending, some have raised concerns about outside influence from unions and political parties in local elections.

Peoria school-board candidate Peter Pingerelli questioned accepting money from unions, businesses and organizations, noting that it might affect future board decisions.

Campaign-finance records show that Pingerelli raised nearly $350 from individual donors, but Pingerelli noted that he has received almost $1,000 to date for signs and fliers.

Of the $2,000 McCord received, $400 came from the Peoria Education Association, a teachers union that frequently donates to board candidates. So far, he has bought a website, signs and fliers.

McCord rebutted the perception of favoritism: "The people who give me money think I'm doing a good job. I'm not swayed one way or the other by contributions."

Although Smith has not raised funds this go-around, he received $9,110 in the previous election. More than $7,100 came from firefighter unions. Smith is a Glendale firefighter.

This year, Smith expects to spend most of his roughly $3,000 in rollover funds on robocalls to registered voters.

To save money, Pingerelli, Tracy Livingston and Matt Bullock split the cost of a flier advertising them as a Republican slate. In a recent teachers candidate forum, they drew criticism for running along party lines in a nonpartisan race.

"I'm very disappointed that they're making it into a political race," said Carol Lokare, a Democrat running for District 21 in the state House of Representatives. "There's no Republican way to teach a kid how to write. There's no Democrat way to teach a kid how to write."

Aside from the flier, records show the candidates have not shared any other costs. None has received any financial support from the Republican Party.

The candidates said that if elected, they will not vote in lockstep, citing their varied positions on issues such as Proposition 204 and the district bond issue.

"We probably talked and e-mailed maybe five times total," said Bullock, who has raised less than $1,000 from small donors and personal funds. That money mostly has gone to paying for websites, fliers and signs, he said.

Livingston is funding her campaign, spending less than $500 on a website, robocall, fliers and business cards.

Although historically candidates have not run along party lines on the school-board level, Kim Fridkin, a political-science professor at Arizona State University, said it makes sense for candidates to play up party affiliation.

"They need to be pretty confident that that party will help them and not hurt them," Fridkin said.

Newcomer Bill Bercu has bought about 100 small signs but said he is trying to avoid spending any more money.

"I want to keep it under $500," Bercu said. "To me, (money is) not the way to go. It's service."

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House Republicans riven by internal battle over spending

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A battle among Republicans in the House of Representatives over government spending laid bare on Thursday deep divisions that threaten the party's hopes of major gains in the November congressional elections.

House Speaker John Boehner, the top Republican in Congress, faced a new challenge to his authority as lawmakers aligned to the budget-slashing Tea Party movement ignored his plea to support a $260 billion job creation measure he had championed.

Boehner told reporters he was ready to abandon the highway, bridges and railroad funding bill after fiscally conservative lawmakers balked at the price tag.

The bill was meant to help Republicans stake an election-year claim as the party of job creation, funding as many as 7.8 million new jobs in the U.S. construction industry.

But Tea Party-affiliated lawmakers, a powerful group within the 242-member House Republican caucus, were elected in 2010 on a wave of voter discontent over a bad economy and government spending. They have repeatedly shown themselves to be uncompromising on tax and spending issues, bringing the United States to the brink of an unprecedented debt default last year.

"This is a very difficult process we're in," Boehner acknowledged on Thursday. "We've got a new majority, we've got 89 freshmen and my job every day is to work with our members and find out where the center of gravity is," he said.

Boehner has struggled over the past year to control an unruly caucus that has often bucked his leadership, raising repeated questions about his staying power. The Republican leader and aides dismiss talk that he is vulnerable to an ouster.

But internal revolt is also stirring over federal spending levels for 2013. Fiscally conservative lawmakers now want even deeper spending cuts than those agreed to with the White House in a deficit reduction deal last August.

So, instead of putting the finishing touches on a budget that they can contrast with Democratic spending priorities in an election year, Republican leaders huddled with House Budget Committee members on Thursday in an effort to quell the conflict within their party.

But they failed to agree on a spending cut target that could please both conservatives and more moderate members.

"There are differences of opinion within our conference," Representative Mike Simpson told reporters after the meeting.

AIDES ACKNOWLEDGE DIFFICULTIES

Veteran Washington political analyst Larry Sabato said there was a "deep divide, not fully acknowledged within the caucus."

"They don't grasp how deep," he said.

The intra-party infighting comes seven weeks after House Republicans pledged at a party retreat to bury their differences and unify to defeat President Barack Obama in November.

The display of unity followed a public relations nightmare for them in December when the party struggled to heal an internal rift over whether to extend a costly payroll tax cut extension for 160 million Americans.

The squabbling threatens to distract the party when it is meant to be focused on retaining control of the House and recapturing the Senate from Democrats.

Two senior House Republicans aides, asking not to be identified, acknowledged the difficulties their party faced just eight months before the November 6 elections.

"It is easy to take a snapshot now and say, 'look things aren't going well,'" one of the aides said, while laying the blame on Democrats. "We don't have the Senate and we don't have the White House. Nobody expected this Congress would be easy."

The second aide said Boehner was in a difficult bind. If he decided to allow a 2013 House budget proposal with deeper spending cuts than planned in order to win Tea Party support, he could end up painting the party into a corner.

The aide said setting a lower level in the spending bills might be popular with some voters, but the bills, which must be approved by September 30, were unlikely to get Democratic votes and enough moderate Republican support to assure passage.

That would leave Republicans with two choices just six weeks before the November 6 elections, the aide said: Switch their votes to support the higher spending levels - a potentially embarrassing move - or threaten government shutdowns as funding would be running out with the start of the new fiscal year on October 1. That likely would bring a strong voter backlash.

Representative Bill Shuster, a six-term Republican who worked to build Republican support for the now-stalled transportation bill, said the large number of Republican newcomers to the House makes for an uphill battle.

"You have 89 members who never seen a transportation bill before," Shuster said of the freshmen, many of them Tea Party supporters. "It's a lot of people to educate."

(Additional reporting by Thomas Ferraro, editing by Ross Colvin; desking by Cynthia Osterman)

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