By in
Rhode Island’s Future
One way the Gaspee Business Network is unlike a traditional
chamber of commerce, says its founder Mike Stenhouse, is it has no legal
structure and isn’t registered with the Secretary of State.
The Rhode Island
Progressive Democrats thinks it should have a legal structure, and filed a campaign finance complaint with
the state Board of Elections yesterday
relating to a string negative mailers targeting left-leaning legislators. The
mailers said they were paid for by the Gaspee Business Network and the Gaspee
Project.
“Given how few rules there
are,” said Sam Bell, state director of RIPDA, “it is shocking that
right-wing groups like the Gaspee Business Network find ways to break the law.
The brazen refusal to disclose the money fueling their nasty attacks shows a
rampant disregard for the law.”
RIPDA alleges the Gaspee
Business Network paid for 58 mailers without filing the proper campaign finance
law disclosure forms. Because it didn’t, RIPDA said in its complaint, the group
now needs to disclose who funded the mailers.
Stenhouse disagrees,
saying the Gaspee Business Network is “merely a marketing sub-brand, an
initiative of the official legal entity – The Gaspee Project, which has met
with the RI Board of Elections on numerous occasions in order to understand and
comply with election reporting laws.”
He said the Gaspee
Business Network has a bank account, but is not its own entity. He said he took
the additional step of filing a “fictitious name” report with the Secretary of
State so to avoid this confusion.
On Gaspee Business Network’s website, this is
disclosed with a asterisk in fine print at the bottom of a page. “GBN is an
initiative of The Gaspee Project, a nonprofit organization; your partnership
donation or other gift to Gaspee is not tax-deductible,” it says. The Gaspee
Project is a legal non-profit that engages in election activity.
But Bell says Stenhouse
has bent the rules to the point of breaking them.
“If an entity exists
enough to say on a mailer that it paid for the mailer, then it exists enough to
file a disclosure report,” he said. “If Stenhouse wants to invent an imaginary
group that doesn’t exist, he is free to do that. But then he shouldn’t
put out mailers saying that the imaginary group that doesn’t exist paid for the
mailers.”
He added, “I should also
note that “mythical” organizations typically do not have websites. Moreover, it
is deeply telling that Stenhouse did not respond to the other violations
documented in the complaint, which include a donor left off of a mailer,
multiple prior donors not disclosed, and violations of the readability
standards.”
Stenhouse is also the
director of another small government advocacy group, the Rhode Island Center
for Freedom and Prosperity. While he often claims the Gaspee Project and the
Center are legally separate, at the initial meeting of the Gaspee Business
Network’s initial meeting, he explained how the two entities work together.
“It was formed because,
after a few years, we found that work at the Center, my other organization,
we’ve been working on a [small government] agenda for years,” he said. “But
they don’t pay attention to us. We don’t pose a threat to them, we don’t have
any clout to them. What’s happened in other states successfully throughout the
country is when there is a line to a political organization working in concert
with the first organization, because our Center cannot be political but another
organization can be and when you combine good policy ideas with a little bit of
political lobbying or campaign clout then you start to see the needle move.
When you have political leadership combined with grassroots leadership, that’s
when things happen. And that’s what the Gaspee Network and the Gaspee Project
are designed to do."
Bob Plain is the editor/publisher
of Rhode Island's Future. Previously, he's worked as a reporter for several
different news organizations both in Rhode Island and across the country.