Newark mayor, allies failed to report more than $700K in donations and spending, watchdog says

A joint fundraising committee for Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and his 2022 council slate failed to disclose more than $700,000 in contributions during their campaign, the New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission said in a complaint unveiled Wednesday.

In the complaint, the commission said Baraka and his slate failed to disclose any fundraising or spending since the end of 2021, and that the slate failed to file 48-hour notices to disclose $53,800 in contributions received in the final days of the race. Newark’s municipal election was held in May 2022, with council runoffs the following month.

In total, the commission said, the slate did not disclose $713,458 in contributions and $731,728 in expenditures during the first nine months of 2022.

In a statement, Baraka, who is one of the Democrats seeking their party’s nod for governor next year, said the filings were handled by an outside firm.

“I communicated to them that this was unacceptable and needs to be taken care of as soon as humanly possible,” the mayor said. “I believe deeply in government transparency, and I am confident this will be done and that every dollar will be accounted for and reported.”

The slate’s fourth quarter filing for 2021, the last it submitted to state election officials, was filed in May 2022, months after its January due date.

Baraka’s 2022 slate included Cecil Crump, Lamonica McIver, Anibal Ramos, Dupre Kelly, Luis Quintana, Carlos Gonzalez, Louise Scott-Rountree, Patrick Council, and Louis Weber. Among those candidates, only Weber lost in 2022. The rest are sitting council members.

It’s unclear what penalties the commission will seek to impose on the slate, though those penalties could be severe. State law allows the commission to fine candidates and their fundraising committees up to $9,800 for each transaction they fail to properly report.

In 2017, the commission fined Baraka $30,634 for a series of reporting violations related to his 2014 mayoral bid.

Now, the commission alleges Baraka’s slate failed to properly report roughly 1,100 transactions, meaning Baraka’s slate could face close to $11 million in penalties.

The state’s campaign finance watchdog rarely levies such hefty fines. It has meted out steep penalties for faulty reporting in the past, but an $11 million fine would be an order of magnitude larger than the largest fines on record.

In 2004, the commission fined the Democratic State Committee $255,000 — the largest penalty on record — for a series of reporting violations. The same year, it fined the Republican State Committee $45,750.

In early 2023, it filed complaints against the Democratic State Committee and Democratic Assembly and Senate leadership committees, alleging the three failed to properly disclose nearly $900,000 in contributions and more than $1.1 million in spending in 2017.

The committees faced the potential of hundreds of thousands of dollars in penalties, but they were spared the financial loss after lawmakers cut the statute of limitations on campaign finance cases from 10 years to two in a bill that also sharply raised contribution limits and allowed candidates to create new housekeeping accounts, among other things.