Battenfeld: Michelle Wu running taxpayer-funded stealth campaign

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu is running a virtual stealth reelection campaign out of her taxpayer-funded City Hall office, getting by with just nine paid staffers and advisers – about one-third of what her opponent, Josh Kraft, has on board.

Where is Wu’s campaign headquarters? It remains a mystery just a little more than three months before the preliminary election. She has not yet opened an office but just started leasing “temporary space” on Beacon Street, according to a campaign official. At the end of April, Wu had just three paid staff but recently added a few more as her campaign is ramping up.

But Wu still has not appointed a finance chair. And the mayor just added two people “advising” on field strategy” and has a campaign manager, Julia Leja, who also doubles as a spokesperson, and a deputy campaign manager, Julia Berard.

But she also sometimes relies on mayoral staffers to accompany her to political events. At a recent mayoral forum, her taxpayer-funded staffer Brianna Millor, chief of community engagement, went with Wu. How did Wu collect the 3,500 required signatures to get a place on the ballot? It’s unclear – her campaign didn’t appear to pay anyone to do it.

“We are grateful for all of our support,” Leja told the Herald. The Democratic mayor’s decision to use City Hall as her primary base of operations allows her to skirt campaign finance law which requires that campaigns must pay for political activities and bars city employees from doing campaign work.

It’s also giving her a huge financial advantage over Kraft, who has to spend $4,000 a month for his campaign office and has 29 paid staffers, 10 of them to do field work.

Wu’s campaign spent only $168,019 in April – a relative bargain compared to most fully operational big time campaigns. In contrast, Kraft had to spend $328,560 in April to fund his campaign – nearly twice what Wu paid.

Wu paid a digital director, Bonnie Jin, a total of $6,000 in April. Other staffers include finance director Augusta Durham, who just started working in April, according to OCPF reports.

Wu also paid a company, Liftoff Campaigns, a total of $60,000 last month when she announced her campaign.

The strategy of using City Hall to essentially function as a campaign office this late in the campaign is not unprecedented – other mayors like Tom Menino tried a similar tack.

But at some point Wu has to have a base of operations and field workers that aren’t funded by taxpayers, if only just to have a pretense of not violating campaign finance laws.

When will that happen? Who knows?

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