Zoo’s War Chest
As you may know, the zoo’s $380 million zoo bond measure that is up for vote in May is a steep hike from the previous $125 million bond measure. And construction companies are already salivating at the gravy train.
Oregon Zoo Foundation and friends are preparing to unleash a barrage of ads on us, encouraging a yes vote. They’re propping this up with a PAC (Political Action Committee). Let’s take a look at their financial activity as reported to Oregon SOS. You can independently verify these by going to Oregon SOS website, and searching with the zoo’s committee ID 23293.
They have almost $700,000 war chest!
It comes from two contributions totaling $600K, from Oregon Zoo Foundation (OZF), the 501(c)3 arm of the zoo. There is also a bunch of smaller — but still significant — contributions. OZF’s funding is not transparent, so we don’t know how much of this is from construction companies that would vastly benefit from the bond, if it passes.
And we don’t know what their kickbacks to politicians are (unfortunately, Metro is not that transparent). We do know that two councillors — Nolan and Lewis, have contributed $1,000 each to the PAC.
They outsource a whole lot of their campaign activity to third parties
With their resources exceeding their abilities, they’re requiring to enlist the help of third-party companies — a 501(c)4 organization (Our Oregon), a payroll processing company (ADP), a campaign compliance company (C&E Systems), campaign manager (Elizabeth Smith), etc.
OZF board of directors all have skin in the game
Whoever came up with this idea is brilliant — basically, all board members of OZF are expected to pony up their personal money to this campaign, presumably to ensure that they do their best to get this campaign to pass. Now that they have skin in the game, you’ll bet they’ll work hard to get ‘yes’ votes.
And that means we need to work harder still to get a good turnout for ‘no’ votes.