Hear/See Script Of Anti-O'Donnell Robo Call, Part of Chamber PAC Blitz Including Mailer & Website Blasting O'Donnell 4th dist. Write-In

(Mar. 10, 2011) -- LBReport.com has obtained a recording of one of the "robo-calls" (recorded messages) that we learned yesterday (Mar. 9) and reported (first, again) were received by 4th district residents. We provide its audio and a transcript below.

To hear the call, click here.

This is a city of Long Beach election alert.

Councilman Pat O'Donnell is trying to mislead voters for a write-in campaign on the upcoming ballot.

He has filed in the city term limits law that asks voters to write-in him in for an unprecedented third term. But the truth is he just wants his name for the office so he can run for the Assembly in two years and that will cost Long Beach taxpayers $130,000 for a special election.

Tell Pat "no." This isn't right. Go to DontWriteInPat.com. That's Dont-Write-In-Pat dot com and let him know what you think.

Paid for by Long Beach Jobs PAC. [end recorded call text]

Clicking on the website's link to "Click to send Patrick an email" doesn't send an email directly to Councilman O'Donnell. It sends an email to the domain "dontwriteinpat.com," a domain registered to Chamber PAC participant Randy Gordon (see below), which may indeed convey the message to O'Donnell but also captures the responding person's email address for future contacts/purposes. The opening verbiage "This is a city of Long Beach election alert" invites an ambiguous audio inference that the message is from the City of Long Beach (i.e. Long Beach City Hall) and the PAC identifier isn't given until the end of the message (after its political content has been delivered).

As LBReport.com reported March 9, the Long Beach Jobs PAC is the LB Chamber of Commerce political action committee (PAC). The Chamber PAC endorses candidates, is funded by campaign contributions (not Chamber membership dues) and is legally and financially separate from the LB Area Chamber. The LB Area Chamber as a membership entity doesn't endorse candidates; it takes advocacy positions on policy matters (decided by Chamber leadership) and operates on member dues. Chamber President/CEO Randy Gordon tells LBReport.com that the Chamber PAC is conducting independent expenditures to support the candidate it has endorsed in the 4th district race, John Watkins.

State law allows independent expenditure committees (PACs) to support or oppose candidates for office...with the proviso that the independent activities must be entirely independent of the candidate with no ties or coordination whatsoever with a candidate.

4th district voters will see two names printed on their ballot: John Watkins (a retired LBPD Sergeant) and Daryl Supernaw (president of the Atherton Corridor Neighborhood Ass'n and a member of LB City Hall's advisory Sustainability Commission [cited here for identification]).

Voters may also choose to write-in Councilman O'Donnell, who's seeking reelection via the write-in procedure allowed under LB's term limits law. O'Donnell was elected to the Council in 2004 with the support of the LB Police Officers Ass'n, which has endorsed his write-in campaign effort. If no Council candidate receives over 50% of the vote in April, and if O'Donnell finishes first or second, he could proceed to a June runoff in which his name would be listed alongside the other candidate.

In fall 2011, after Assembly incumbent Bonnie Lowenthal announced she was a candidate for a newly drawn state Senate seat in 2012, Councilman O'Donnell announced he would seek the LB Assembly seat in 2012. Assemblywoman Lowenthal then abandoned her state Senate run in favor of seeking reelection to the Assembly in 2012, and O'Donnell announced he would seek reelection to the Council in 2012. In 2014, Assemblywoman Lowenthal will be term limited in the Assembly...and that Assembly seat will become open to anyone.

In 2009, the Chamber sued and succeeded in declaring unconstitutional (first amendment grounds) the portion of LB's 1994 voter-enacted campaign reform law that limited campaign contributions to non-candidate controlled committees (independent expenditure PACs). As a result, the Chamber PAC and any other PACs are now free to collect and expend basically unlimited sums to support or oppose candidates in city elections if done independently of the candidates themselves. (The sums collected by independent committees can easily eclipse money collected by candidate controlled committees, where contributions remain limited to $350 in the upcoming Council races).

In a political irony, labor interests used the Chamber's lawsuit victory to expend large sums in the 2010 election cycle that helped elect Steve Neal (and undermine Chamber-backed incumbent Val Lerch) in the 9th district.

As reported by LBReport.com yesterday (Mar. 9), some 4th district residents received a mailer (Mar. 9) opposing Councilman O'Donnell's reelection bid. The mailer indicates it's from "Long Beach Jobs Pac" ID # 1291389.

LBReport.com also reported yesterday, the website "www.DontWriteInPat.com" was registered to Randy Gordon in late February, 2012.

Screen save of www.dontwriteinpat.com, Mar. 9, 2012

Question for our readers: If you're a 4th district resident, LBReport.com is interested in knowing if any of this will affect how you vote and if so, in what way(s)? (Recall: this appears to be an independent expenditure, meaning it's done independently of any candidate.) If you'd like LBReport.com to publish your comments email us at: mail@LBReport.com. Let us know if you'd like us to use or omit your name...and thank you.