The New York City Campaign Finance Board hit a hard reset on its top leadership as attorney Paul S. Ryan took the helm last month facing high-profile challenges from the start following theRyan’s arrival comes at pivotal time for the city’s Campaign Finance Board, which prides itself on being the gold standard for accountability and transparency when it comes to administering money in politics.
“I like to remind people that this agency is a real asset to democracy here in New York City and most places, most cities, most voters around the United States don't have an agency like this helping make their elections more open and more transparent,” he said., a network of organizations focused on fostering democratic engagement and participation based in Washington, D.C.
“The reason that we care about intermediaries, the reason we care about bundling disclosure here is, in the absence of that transparency, there's no check on the ability of someone to collect a bunch of checks and then to get access and influence, or at least hope to as a result of that fundraising,” Ryan said.
At a recent CFB meeting this month, the agency’s board members approved audits for a dozen City Council candidates who ran in 2021, including Restler. But when he and his colleagues ran for re-election in 2023, the CFB had not yet completed any audits of the 2021 Council campaigns due to a backlog of cases.
Ryan’s predecessor pledged to speed up the audit process prior to her departure from the Campaign Finance Board last year. There were 427 outstanding audits of campaigns dating back to 2017 as of last July, according to the agency. Speaking broadly using the ongoing investigations into the Adams’ campaign as an example, Patrick Jenkins, a Democratic political consultant and frequent critic of the agency, argued that the current matching system incentivizes finding loopholes.