Sarah Palin’s Eugene speech helped the Lane County Republicans pull in more than a quarter-million dollars in revenue — enough that even after paying costs for the conservative headliner’s appearance, the party is still sitting on a mountain of cash for campaign spending.
Contributing to the local party’s hefty haul is the bargain it apparently got for the cost of her April 23 appearance. Campaign-finance disclosures indicate the Lane County Republican Party has paid Palin’s booking agency $35,000 — less than half of what media reports indicate is Palin’s standard fee for West Coast appearances.
With the fall elections approaching, the Lane County Republican Central Committee has a balance of $118,153, according to its campaign finance disclosures to the Oregon Secretary of State’s Elections Division. Typically, local party committees use their funds to help their party’s candidates, locally or statewide.
Chairman Bill Young said that while it might have struck some as an audacious move for a Republican Party in a predominantly Democratic-voting Oregon county, it paid off nicely.
“It turned out to be a good money-maker for us,” said Young, a veterinarian who also is running for a state House seat in Eugene. “And it turned out to be a great, motivational, exciting event for us.”
Typically, the Lane County Republican Central Committee brings in contributions from a handful of monthly donors, Young said, but nothing like what it has collected this year.
In 2009, for example, the party started the year $1,440 in debt and ended up with reported contributions totalling $60,466. After expenses and other financial adjustments, the party ended 2009 with a balance of $328.73.
About 850 people attended Palin’s April 23 speech at the Lane Republicans’ annual Lincoln Day Dinner. It cost $250 to be in the main hall at the Hilton Eugene where Palin spoke, or $100 to watch on closed-circuit TV in a nearby banquet room. About 70 attendees also paid $1,000 apiece to mingle with Palin and her family, pose for a photo with the former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate, and receive an autographed copy of her memoir.
The money from attendees made up most of the $268,453 in receipts reported by the Lane County Republicans for the year so far.
Bringing Palin and her entourage to Eugene, renting space at the Hilton, and paying for the food, drinks, security, transportation and other costs associated with such an event wasn’t cheap.
The Lane County Republicans reported expenditures of $108,375 directly related to “fundraising event expenses,” according to the state’s campaign finance database. Among them: paying the Hilton $51,055, paying an audio-visual staging and special events company $11,072, and cutting a check for $1,956 to a commercial photographer.
Young said some outstanding expenses may still need to be settled for security, with both a private firm and with the Eugene Police Department. The police have billed $3,638.25 for 47¼ hours of dignitary protection work at the Hilton during Palin’s visit. The party also has yet to pay for sending copies of Palin’s book to those who ordered them at the event.
Paying these remaining bills, Young said, “is not going to change our financial position.”
One of the biggest apparent boons to that financial position is the relative bargain the party seems to have gotten from Palin’s booking agency, the Washington Speakers Bureau. The campaign-finance reports indicate two payments of $17,500 by the party to the bureau, one in January and another in March.
Politico has reported Palin charges $100,000, with a discount to $75,000 for West Coast appearances. In California, where Palin is to speak this month for a state university foundation’s fundraiser, she will be paid $75,000, the Los Angeles Times reported last week.
Young said he was barred from publicly discussing the terms of the contract to bring Palin to Eugene. However, he said no additional payments were owed to her booking agency and that no third parties were helping make payments to the Washington Speakers Bureau on the Lane County Republicans’ behalf.
The local Republican Party is in a financially enviable position compared with that of the Democratic Party of Lane County. The latter has reported campaign contributions totalling $4,324 so far this year, and a balance currently of $36,818.
The Lane Democrats’ vice chairwoman, Carol Horne Dennis, said her party is concerned an influx of large sums of money into the local political process would make campaigns “less about the issues and more about airing dozens of negative ads.”
“As a party, Democrats will stick to the issues, and we’ll compete by knocking on doors,” she said.