RSM City Councilwoman Carol Gamble Faces FPPC Investigation
It was in early August 2019 when I detailed some issues with councilwoman Gamble, and in that time, she has chosen to dig in and attack rather than just answer the very simple question. I wanted to get receipts for the over $3,000 she spent in the 2016 election on travel, lodging, and food to re-win her seat in that election, that’s the bottom line item with the code TRC.
I asked for nearly four months without a response:
Because of Gamble’s failure to respond, it makes it look like she was draining campaign funds in anticipation of not running again, so I finally decided to file a Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC) complaint, the text of which read:
Our city of Rancho Santa Margarita has about 48,000 people with about 20,000 being eligible voters. The city is just under 13 square miles and was incorporated on Jan 1, 2000, on wikipedia it is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rancho_Santa_Margarita%2C_California
Carol Gamble was part of the team that got the city incorporated originally and then served on the city council from 2000 to 2004. She then came back in 2011 and serves to this day. That is to provide context for the 2016 election. We had 2 seats up for re-election, they were Carol Gamble and Tony Beall, Tony started with the city in 2000 as Carols City Planner and joined the city council in 2004, where he serves to this day. These long term incumbents had only a single self-funded challenger to their seats in the 2016 election, while they had thousands of dollars in contributions, much of it coming in from city vendors.
If I’m reading this form 460 correctly, the line item for $3,007.15 is to reimburse herself for travel, lodging, and food for her election. It simply isn’t possible to spend that kind of money in a city that you can drive from one end to the other in 5 minutes, and we have no hotels/motels in the city. There was a single self-funded candidate who spent less than $300 on the campaign while Carol spent over $8,000 on the campaign. It is my belief that she had/has no intention to run in 2020 and wanted to cash out some campaign funds early while there was no scrutiny.
I have emailed Carol Gamble on several occasions for receipts for those expenses with no response, those emails were on April 8, 2019: April 29, 2019, and June 27, 2019. If your system allows it, I will include a screenshot of those attempts. Given her refusal to disclose, I have turned to your agency. Thank you for your help in this matter.
The way this works is that Gamble is sent a notice by the FPPC which she can respond to and provide information that will stop an investigation happening because she gave a valid response to the question, or she can ignore that request and the FPPC has to decide if they will investigate or not. Today I received notice from the FPPC that they have opened an investigation into Councilwoman Gamble’s financial disclosures. When the investigation is complete, I will report back on the findings.
