State Rep. Leslie Herod’s mayoral campaign must be skating on thin ice if she can’t even handle a legit criticism from a citizen’s group that advocates for cleaning up Denver’s squalor and homeless camps and cracking down on crime.
Herod is using taxpayer dollars for her mayoral campaign and sent her campaign lawyer after the Citizens for a Safe and Clean Denver to file an official complaint against the group for failing to add a disclaimer the four times they criticized her.
Herod succeeded in getting a $250 fine out of the group, which was established last year with a whopping investment of $1,500 to date.
PeakNation™ will recall that we reported just this week on Herod’s inability to follow state campaign laws regarding own personal financial disclosers, of which the last failure to file for 300 days racked up fines of more than $15,000.
While Herod was twisting $250 out of a group operating on fumes, she was getting her own fine busted down to a mere $50.
Jimmy Sengenberger writes about the citizens’ group fine in his latest Denver Gazette column.
The final verdict was a mixed bag. The clerk’s hearing officer, Macon Cowles, found the group had spent just over $1,500 total since its founding in July 2021, almost exclusively on its own administrative costs. Cowles concluded that the proportion of those funds spent on communications targeting Herod didn’t remotely meet the $1,000 minimum for disclosing independent campaign expenditures under Denver law.
Cowles estimated Safe and Clean Denver spent at most $81.52 on the Herod communications.
“SCD is a grassroots organization sustained on about $90 a month, largely on in-kind contributions from its President,” Cowles wrote in his order. He called Safe and Clean Denver “the antithesis of a ‘dark money’ group” — batting away a preposterous claim made by Herod in a fund-raising newsletter.
Still on the group’s website is one criticism:
Thanks to advocates for criminal justice reform, like Leslie Herod, crime rates in Colorado are among the worst in the nation.
The group also has a candidate’s page that offers tough evaluates of nearly every candidate running for mayor.
The only difference is the disclosure now at the bottom of the page.
Herod’s thin-skinned complaint does not inspire confidence in her ability to take responsibility for a city that’s plagued with the same problems she’s criticized for failing to address.