The Taneytown city attorney, speaking on behalf of the town’s ethics commission, presented concerns about campaign finance forms at a Taneytown City Council meeting Wednesday evening.
The ethics commission, City Attorney Jay Gullo Jr. said, requested that the mayor and five-member city council consider amending Taneytown’s campaign finance ordinance to impose fines for candidates who don’t report campaign finances accurately.
Gullo also said that the commission wants the council to mandate that the candidates’ already required separate, campaign bank account be a checking account — as opposed to savings — so that every transaction would have a paper trail because cash is “hard to account for.”
“It disturbs me that there were these errors and omissions that have occurred repeatedly,” Mayor James McCarron said after the meeting. “It just raises red flags. You never want to think that anybody would do anything dishonest.”
The ethics commission recorded two accounts of inaccurate campaign finance reporting, which resulted in more work for volunteers and paid employees, Gullo said.
“It’s like having somebody do their homework right, versus having a teacher correct it all,” he said.
McCarron said the council will take a hard look at the ethics ordinance.
“I want to make sure that it’s very easy to understand and follow,” McCarron said, admitting that he hadn’t reviewed the municipal law in a while.
But McCarron is by no means rejecting the proposed idea of fining candidates that fall short of campaign finance reporting requirements.
“The idea of requiring some kind of fine or penalty makes complete sense,” he said. “There are too many things we legislate that don’t have any teeth in them to back them up.”
This story will be updated.
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