Common Sense For New Hampshire

In this post I will recount the journey of a 29 Day Pre-Election report for the “Jen and Connie for Council 2011” campaign. The candidates, Jennifer Nicolay and Concetta Gutierrez, originally filed the report with NJ ELEC on October 17, 2011.  For brevity’s sake I am posting only the relevant pages, which would be the front page and the contribution reporting pages.

So here is the original report:

Two things should stand out to anyone practiced at filling out these reports.  First is that Luis Pulido, the former Belmar Democratic Committee chairman, gave a total of $350 cash in that reporting period.  The limit from a single donor for a single candidate in one election is $200.

The second concern is the $1000 in-kind contribution reported as coming from Pulido’s company, LBP Enterprises.  The problem is that LBP is an LLC.  Campaigns are not allowed to take donations from LLCs.  The contribution must come as a personal donation from the LLC’s owner.

We don’t know if there was any penalty resulting from the oversize $350 cash donation from Pulido, but we do know that the state must have learned that LBP was an LLC because on March 22, 2012 an amended report was filed that changed the source Pulido’s $1000 in-kind donation from Pulido’s LLC to Pulido himself.

Well that should have been the end of it and later in the year the $47.50 remaining in the account was turned over to the Belmar Democratic Committee and an R1 Final Report was filed closing out the account.

I see that although they never filed a D-2 form to notify the state, Luis Pulido had taken over at this point as campaign treasurer.  (Conor Egan was treasurer for the earlier reports.)  Interestingly, Connie Gutierrez didn’t sign this final report.

It turns out it might have been a little premature to be calling things final.  The state had apparently been looking at the bank records for the campaign and found that $250 more had been deposited in the campaign account than had been reported in the 29 Day Pre-Election report.  The omission was listed as Count One in the state’s complaint of August 26, 2015.

So the total deposits of donations of $300 or less was found to be $2475, but the total reported was only $2225.

Now things get really strange.

Apparently in response to Count One, on October 13, 2015 an amended, amended 29 Day Pre-Election report was filed.

Okaaaay.  So it turns out that Jennifer’s brother, Paul Martinetz, gave a $250 cash donation back in July, 2011 that they happened to forget to record.  It has been added to the Schedule A page and line 2 of the monetary receipts on the cover page has been changed from $1040 to $1290.

Couple of problems there.  First of all, the books for the campaign have already been closed out so where does the additional $250 fit in?  It’s got to be somewhere, it can’t just be left hanging.

The other problem is this:

Oh yeah, that again.

BTW, looking at the amended, amended report above, what happened to the in-kind contributions from Matt Doherty and from LBP Enterprises Luis Pulido that were in the original report and in the first amended report?……………………………………………..

OK, let’s try this one more time.

To be continued?