Campaign finance reports for the first six months of the year show more than $120,000 was raised — and nearly $112,000 was spent — in the race for Pima County county attorney and sheriff. Here’s what the reports released June 30 show:
Pima County Attorney
In the Democratic primary race for county attorney, incumbent Barbara LaWall raised three times the amount of money as her opponent, Joel Feinman, according to finance reports from Jan. 1 to May 31.
LaWall raised $75,255 in donations this period, and already had $56,364 in her account. During that time, Feinman brought in $25,105, carrying over $71,240 from the previous reporting period, which ended on Dec. 31.
Neither of the candidates took any loans this year, with all of the money raised coming from donations.
Feinman spent more money than he brought in, with $46,000 in disbursements.LaWall spent $60,569, with both candidates’ money being spent on campaign materials, events and staffing, as well as social media and regular advertising.
As of May 31, LaWall had $71,051 left in her campaign fund, and Feinman had $50,477.
Notable donors to LaWall’s campaign this year include Congressman Ron Barber, Arizona state Sen. Andrea Dalessandro, University of Arizona Police captain Brian Seastone, former U.S. Sen. Dennis DeConcini, former Pima County Supervisor Dan Eckstrom and former Tucson Mayor Bob Walkup.
The winner of the primary faces a challenger from the Green Party, but Cyndi Tuell has raised less than $500.
Pima County Sheriff
A significantly smaller amount of money is circulating in the race for sheriff, but the finance reports for both Republican candidates were missing expenses, according to county records.
Terry Staten took in $17,737 during the reporting period, including an $11,000 personal loan to himself and $6,000 in other loans. Only $1,200 of the money he raised came from donations.
He recorded $3,607 in expenses — $2,436 of which was paid to his campaign consulting firm — and closed out the reporting period with a balance of $14,130.
However, expenses related to his campaign website were not included in the report.
The web expenses were inadvertently left out of the report prepared by his consulting firm, said Marketing Management employee Christina Cruz.
She said that she forgot to include the receipts, and would file an amended report with the Pima County Elections Department on Wednesday.
Mark Napier brought in $4,811, with $4,286 of that coming from donations and $500 from a loan to himself. He spent $1,839 and had a closing balance of $2,971.
Absent from Napier’s report were website fees and costs for “boosted” Facebook posts, which are intended to increase traffic to a user’s page by promoting it to a larger audience.
Napier said Tuesday that the error in reporting was an oversight.
“I established my campaign account, but had not yet received my debit card,” he wrote in an email. “When I established the domain name and started Facebook boost I used my personal debit card as a temporary measure, because the campaign debit card was not yet available.”
He went on to say that he had intended to update the bank account information with the website host and Facebook when the debit card came.
“These low dollar charges were inadvertently charged to my personal account and I did not catch it,” he said, adding that he contacted the Elections Department to file an amended return.
Finance reports for Sheriff Chris Nanos show a March 22 payment for $113 to GoDaddy for the “upgrade, maintenance and launch” of his campaign website.
Nanos, a Democrat, doesn’t have a challenger for the primary election, but he’s still been busy fundraising.
He had $1,787 in his account and raised $10,695 in donations this period, $4,000 of which came from DeConcini and his wife. In addition to the donations, Nanos loaned himself $1,000.
After recording $2,126 in expenses this period, the closing balance on his account was $11,356.
One more finance report will be released before the August 30 primary election, and will cover activity from June 1 to Aug. 18.
