March 07, 2025

PDC to celebrate Sunshine Week at the Capitol 

The Public Disclosure Commission will have a booth at the third-floor mezzanine of the state Legislative Building on March 18 and 19 to celebrate Sunshine Week. Staff plan to promote the agency’s mission increase transparency and timely reporting of campaign and lobbyist spending and the financial affairs of officeholders. 

Sunshine Week is an annual national non-partisan collaboration of civic and government groups, journalists, and members of the private sector that works to promote the importance of public records and open government. Sunshine Week 2025 is March 16-22.  

Commission discusses expenditure filing deadlines, plans engagement session  

The Commission directed PDC staff to consider ways to improve the reporting schedule.  

Currently, campaign expenditure reports, known as C-4 reports, have due dates that depend on the amount of a candidate or committee’s financial activity and their election participation. For that reason, a committee participating in the 2025 general election has different C-4 due dates than a committee participating in the April 2025 special election.  

This sometimes leads to confusion for candidates and committees trying to determine their filing requirements. The Public Disclosure Commission is considering proposals intended to standardize and simplify the campaign expenditure reporting calendar, with the intention of helping campaigns keep track of deadlines and improving transparency.  

A virtual engagement session to discuss the plan is scheduled for at 10:30 a.m. on March 11.  Email pdc@pdc.wa.gov to register to participate.   

Elements of a proposal could include:  

  • Common due dates for all committees and candidates, regardless of election participation 

  • Twice-monthly reporting of expenditures for all campaigns  

  • Additional reporting deadlines in the days before an election  

Meanwhile, the state Legislature is also considering deadlines for mandatory expenditure reports, currently due 21 and 7 days before an election regardless of financial activity. House Bill 1782 would make those reports due at 20 and 6 days before an election, to give campaigns an additional 24 hours to prepare the reports. 

The PDC previously proposed this change along with a third mandatory report due one month before the general election – which was designed to improve disclosure at a time of increased spending by campaigns.  

PDC General Counsel Sean Flynn commented on behalf of the agency in opposition to the bill. He reported at the February meeting that staff believed the bill would result in a “net-loss” to transparency without the additional required report, and that disclosure would better be served by a wholistic approach to reassessing expenditure reporting deadlines.   

PDC continues work to increase compliance on mandatory pre-election reporting 

On a similar topic, PDC Deputy Director Kim Bradford gave an update on a project started in 2024 intended to increase compliance in mandatory C-4 reporting deadlines. The project involved notifying filers in advance of each deadline, and again following each deadline if the reports were not filed on time.  

“We had great success with this project,” Bradford said.   

As of the February meeting, 95 percent of filers owing these reports were in compliance. Of 480 candidates in the 2024 primary election, 20 are missing one or more reports, and out of 415 in the general election, 16 are still missing one or more reports.  

The next step, Bradford said, is to improve outreach to small campaigns that have registered for full-reporting – meaning they plan to raise or spend more than $7,000 and owe all reports – to see if they would be better off as mini-reporting, in which no reports are due but campaigns must raise no more than $7,000 and accept no more than $500 from each contributor.  

Other future options could include implementing staff-initiated enforcement prior to the primary election. The outreach program conducted last year involved reminder emails before elections but no formal enforcement efforts taken until after the election cycle. 

State’s budget woes could impact PDC 

As commissioners met, Gov. Bob Ferguson was announcing his plan to trim state agency budgets. The Governor’s Office had previously directed the PDC to present a budget with a 6-percent cut overall. In addition to those suggested cuts, the governor’s office also proposed eliminating a new IT position focusing on security in IT development and furloughing staff one day per month, as part of efforts to pare down the state’s projected budget shortfall for the next biennium.  

The PDC’s fiscal year 2025 budget was about $6.1 million. To read about how the budget breaks down each year, see past PDC annual reports.  

Other cuts proposed to reduce the agency’s proposed budget by 6 percent include cutting back on PDC travel spending by reducing in-person commission meetings, focusing on remote rather than in-person training and outreach, and pausing of the PDC’s recent practice of holding one meeting per year outside of Olympia. The agency also plans to cut back on some subscriptions and services, including a contract with an outside agency working with the PDC to improve its website and reporting applications.  

Enforcement update 

Between January 15 and February 18, the PDC received 108 new complaints, bringing the agency’s total active complaints to 307. Of those 307, 113 are under initial review, 171 are under formal investigation and 23 are scheduled for brief enforcement hearings with the Commission.  

During that time, 79 cases were closed. Of those, nine were closed with no evidence of a violation, three with reminders, 15 were dismissed by the Executive Director, eight resolved as remediable issues, three as technical corrections, 21 as warnings, 15 with statements of understanding and five were found in violation by the Commission at brief hearings.  

Of all of the closed cases, three were for statewide, 10 for legislative and 29 local candidates, three commercial advertisers, one public agency, one grassroots lobbying campaign, 31 political committees and one contributor.  

Of the 15 statements of understanding, five were for political committees which had received reminders for failing to timely and accurately file 21- and or 7-day pre-primary, and again failed to timely and accurately file those reports before the general election. The committees spent between $13,000 and $92,000 in 2024. 

Staff highlighted another case closed during the past month, in which a donor to three 2024 campaigns, including two statewide candidates and an initiative committee, inadvertently left the impression that the donor’s deceased spouse had also contributed. This is because the donor paid for the contributions using a check from a joint checking account with the deceased spouse’s name still on the check.  

It is common practice for campaigns receiving donations from joint accounts to split the contribution evenly between the two account holders when reporting these contributions. That caused some confusion in this case and led to several complaints to the PDC. The complaint against the contributor was dismissed with a reminder, and the cases against the campaigns were dismissed with no violation after they amended their reports to attribute the entire contribution to the living donor.