Oceanside Unified fined $4K by state election watchdog for illegal mailer 5 years ago

Oceanside Unified School District was fined $4,000 this week by state election regulators for sending a mailer featuring its board members at public expense.

The California Fair Political Practices Commission unanimously approved the penalty Thursday.

In a newsletter mailed to nearly 78,000 people in October 2020, each member of the district’s school board was included in a section called “Our OUSD Board of Trustees,” the FPPC wrote.

Under California’s Political Reform Act, agencies are not allowed to send mass mailings at public expense if they feature an elected official of the agency. That law aims to ensure political transparency and ethics, and to prevent taxpayer money from being used to influence elections.

“California’s ethics and transparency laws are clear: Taxpayer funds cannot be used to highlight elected officials,” wrote FPPC Chair Adam E. Silver in a statement Friday.

The election regulator said the individual Oceanside Unified board members weren’t aware of the mailer before it was sent and didn’t know their photos would be included.

Only one of the trustees was on the ballot that year, but four of the district’s five trustees have been successfully re-elected since the mailer was sent, the FPPC wrote.

“The public harm inherent in mass mailing at public expense violations is that the mailings may unfairly favor the featured elected officer,” the stipulation read. “Mass mailing at public expense violations cause a high degree of public harm when the featured elected officer appears on the ballot for an upcoming election.”

Oceanside Unified spokesperson Donald Bendz called the mailer a “simple accident” made in 2020 and said the district was not aware it violated the law.

“We made the adjustment to our process moving forward and have learned from this situation,” he wrote.

He said the district was “pleased with the outcome.” 

The FPPC’s investigation and fine stemmed from a complaint by Todd Maddison, who is the research director of Transparent California, a database of public employee pay and pensions, and was a candidate for the Oceanside Unified school board in 2020.

The FPPC did not issue any enforcement action against Oceanside Unified for any of the other claims in that complaint, which had also alleged that a 2024 mailing violated the law and that the district was aware.

“The Commission reviewed and investigated the September 2024 mailer and determined that no violation of the Act occurred with respect to that complaint allegation,” the stipulation said in a footnote.

Maddison said Friday that he had not read the stipulation, but that his complaint had focused on the district’s 2024 mailer and that he had mentioned the 2020 one mainly to establish a pattern.

“Given both were identical situations … I have no idea why they would find one was a violation and the other was not,” he said. He added that he would seek clarification.

He also found the $4,000 fine small.

“Oceanside will just take it out of the fund for library books or for bathroom cleaning,” he said.