Now that she's retiring, the candidates running for her south county seat have thrown conventional spending out the window - in particular Nadia Lockyer, who is tapping her state treasurer husband's campaign fund to spend sums more often seen in races for Congress than for a county post.
Normally, the spending by Lockyer's rival, former state Sen. Liz Figueroa, would have been enough to raise eyebrows. She has shelled out more than $120,000 to try to win the seat in Tuesday's election.
But Lockyer has been on another plane - she's raised $1.6 million. That's slightly more than the $1.47 million nationwide average spent to wage a successful campaign for Congress, according to Maplight.org, a Berkeley nonprofit that tracks political fundraising.
In the June primary, Lockyer's spending amounted to $66 per vote received - about $1 more than what Meg Whitman spent to win the Republican gubernatorial primary.
Husband's cash
The bulk of Lockyer's cash has come from her husband, state Treasurer Bill Lockyer, who represented Alameda County for 25 years in the state Legislature and faces only token Republican opposition for re-election Tuesday.
He has redirected more than $1.2 million of his campaign money into his wife's coffers, and his connections to unions and traditional Democratic Party stalwarts have provided much of the rest.
His clout has also helped pull in unusually high-profile endorsements for a 39-year-old candidate for a suburban supervisor's seat, whose experience in elected office consists of one term on a school board in Southern California.
Attorney General Jerry Brown, the Democratic nominee for governor, has endorsed Nadia Lockyer. So has Willie Brown, the onetime state Assembly speaker and former two-term mayor of San Francisco.
Money to party, boss
Bill Lockyer, 69, has given $75,000 to the county Democratic Party, which endorsed his wife. And he's given $5,000 to the campaign of his wife's boss, Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O'Malley, who also endorsed Nadia Lockyer.
The candidate has also racked up some endorsements from city council members in Fremont, Union City and Hayward, all cities included in the Board of Supervisors Second District.
Figueroa, 59, who spent 12 years in the Legislature and 10 years on a waste-management board in southern Alameda County, touts her support as being more local.
Her backers include the mayors of Fremont, Newark and Union City. Most prominently, she won the backing of Steele, who had never endorsed anyone for elected office before.
"To just pour money into advertising to win a race rather than just pay your dues in the community doesn't speak well for the kind of government we have," Steele said.
Controversies
The race has not been without controversy. Lockyer has hammered Figueroa for backlogged property taxes, which Figueroa says she's paying off.
Earlier this year, Lockyer called herself a deputy district attorney on her website and a campaign mailer, when in fact she holds a nonlegal position running a county-sponsored nonprofit. After The Chronicle reported the discrepancy, Lockyer called the description an error and had it removed from her website.
Lockyer did not respond to requests for interviews for this story.
Bill Lockyer's campaign spokesman, Tom Dresslar, said transferring money from one campaign to another was hardly a novel practice, nor unique to Lockyer. Dresslar said Lockyer has transferred millions of dollars to other campaigns in his career.
"It's not like he's some rich sugar daddy coming in and throwing around his weight," Dresslar said. "He's lived and served here his whole life."
Spending contrasts
Bill Lockyer's overflowing coffers have enabled his wife to stock her campaign with four salaried staffers, plus three campaign consultants who were paid an average of $3,000 a week during the last filing period.
The state treasurer's campaign fund has even supplied more than $3,500 for a nanny during 12 campaign events for his wife, according to her disclosure forms. The couple have a 7-year-old son.
Figueroa, by contrast, does not have paid staff, and her campaign is $38,455 in debt.
The transfer of Lockyer campaign funds from husband to wife is perfectly legal, political financing experts note.
"Clearly, he's devoting most of his time to boosting her," said Bob Stern, president of the nonprofit Center for Governmental Studies, who helped draft the state law that governs campaign spending. "It's perfectly legitimate as long as he's reporting everything."
Stern said it's not unusual for powerful politicians to spend their campaign money on family members' public careers.
"You'd be stunned if he weren't," Stern said. "He's clearly grooming his wife for future office."
Figueroa has done it
Figueroa says legality isn't the question.
"It's unethical," she said. "It's definitely a loophole in the law that shouldn't allow someone who has a large war chest to transfer unlimited amounts of money to another candidate."
Dresslar said Figueroa's charge was "hypocrisy." From 1999 to 2006, Figueroa used her campaign to transfer $140,000 to other candidates, Dresslar said.
Campaign spending is "an expression of your First Amendment free speech rights as a candidate," Dresslar said. "Campaigns that have nothing else to offer or say to voters whine about money."
E-mail Matthai Kuruvila at mkuruvila@sfchronicle.com.
For more election-related news and information, visit our California Elections 2010 page.
This article appeared on page C - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
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