Angela Wittrock of mlive.com recently posted 5 articles about Lansing mayor Virg Bernero's fund raising and spending:
I've been keeping track of the 527 account since 2009, providing complete lists of contributions and expenditures since the account was established in 2006. That story is here on this website. Now I've added detail on the other 2 accounts: Virg Bernero for Michigan (detail) As you may know, Virg lost his campaign for governor in November 2010, but the campaign committee has yet to be dissolved. There were only 18 contributions to the campaign in 2011, totaling $1064.01. Only 5 of those were "direct". The others were probably some sort of refund. Expenditures from the committee, however, totaled $36,508.86. In Angela's article, she gives the total as $23,133, a figure she apparently got from the report summary, but the expenditure detail adds up to $36,508.86. Virg Bernero for Lansing (detail) Who knew there was a campaign for mayor going on? In 2011, 2 years after he was re-elected in a landslide, Virg raised another $23,700 - and all of it in one day (1/22/2011), if the report is to be believed (detail here). In addition to the usual list of businesses who do business with the City, eight Board of Water and Light employees and eight City of Lansing employees gave $100-200 each. BWL employees have been generous to Virg in the past, as I found in this analysis of their contributions from 2005-2009. I also have contribution and expenditure detail for 2010. Finally, I thought it would be interesting to see together the contributions to the 527 account and the mayoral campaign, so I combined the contribution records for the 2 funds for the years 2010 and 2011 and then sorted them by employer so you could see which firms were the big overall contributors. It turns out the most contributions from individuals came from City and Board of Water and Light employees. Here is the list. |