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| Tejano Treasurer Dr. Anna Perez |
For the second time in a couple of weeks, Tejano treasurer Dr. Anna Perez has not complied with finance reporting rules set up by the state of Texas. The rules are in place to ensure transparency.
The Tejano Democrats are set-up as a General Political Action Committee (GPAC) and as such are required to file with campaign finance reporting laws just like a candidate.
As you can see here, they are listed as a GPAC (second one from the bottom):
The Tea-janos had their endorsement meeting for candidates on January 15th. Their new plan for endorsements of candidates is actually much more expensive than in previous years. According to a source in the Tejanos, the plan is to do TV, radio, text messaging, and a mail piece for their slate of endorsed candidates.
Here's the rules:
So they most-certainly should've had a report filed with the state for the March primary. That is aside from the OTHER report, the semi-annual, that they are also required to file and failed to do so.
And speaking of text messages, I checked Tony Quintanilla's finance report and guess what. Neither he, nor the Tejanos reported an in-kind donation of the text message sent out by someone in the Tejanos supporting Quintanilla's fundraiser weeks BEFORE the endorsement meeting.
Here's a link to the piece were I first mentioned the text message and this is a screen shot of the actual message:
That is a political expenditure that should have been reported and HAS NOT been reported by neither the Tejanos nor Quintanilla.
This leads to the obvious question - is the lack of yet ANOTHER report that was not filed by the Tejanos due to incompetence or is it strategic?
This is potentially a serious violation, especially given the amount of money that they are going to be leveraging in this election cycle. If the opponents of any of their endorsed candidates pulled the same stunt of not reporting money, they would all likely file complaints with the Texas Ethics Commission.