A panel of administrative law judges ruled Thursday that a slate of six candidates running for Minnetonka City Council violated the Fair Campaign Practices Act by falsely implying on a mailer that they were endorsed by the city.
The Office of Administrative Hearings imposed a $100 civil penalty against each candidate — Wyn Ray, Marshall Glynn, Karen Ahlbrecht, Stacy Cranbrook, Dan Kral and Jim Hadley — for the violation, which it said was "ill-advised and had some minimal impact on voters." The fine must be paid by Feb. 18.
Minnetonka resident Karl Bunday filed a Fair Campaign Practices complaint with the office in October. An evidentiary hearing was held in December to determine if the evidence presented by Bunday showed the candidates implied they had the city's support by including a photo of the official city logo on a joint campaign mailer.
The candidates, all running for the first time, were hoping to capture two open at-large council seats in the city's first ranked-choice election. Voters instead elected Kimberly Wilburn and re-elected City Council Member Deb Calvert.
Lori Weissman, who worked on Calvert's campaign, told the administrative law panel she was surprised Glynn gave her a mailer when door-knocking in her neighborhood after the panel found probable cause for the violation in late October. She told Glynn the mailer was "quite misleading" and advised him to stop distributing it, but he indicated there was no reason to be concerned, she said.
The six candidates hired Ellen Cousins, a former Republican candidate for the Legislature who has worked on several political campaigns, to prepare the mailer, which they subsequently approved before 1,000 copies were made. Cousins told the panel that she took a photo in August 2020 of the city of Minnetonka sign — which features a lower-case M divided by a couple cattails — at Gray's Bay Landing near the marina on Lake Minnetonka.
The photo, prominently displayed on the mailer, was the focus of Bunday's complaint. He noted that the city's informational mailings to residents on how to use ranked-choice voting also used the city's logo. Four other residents provided statements about how they wrongly assumed the candidates' literature was official mail from the city because it instructed voters how to rank candidates.
The candidates said it was not their intent to imply city support, and that the mailer listed their campaign committees as being responsible for it. But Cousins conceded during the evidentiary hearing that "a logo of an organization is significant to communicate endorsement," according to the panel.
The panel stated that "no candidates are pictured on the side of the mailer where the logo is prominently displayed," which it said suggested the mailer was a city communication rather than campaign material. It would be different, the panel said, if a candidate was pictured standing by a city-branded building or location where the logo was displayed.
Bunday said he will suggest the city adopt a policy to prevent future issues of this kind at the next City Council meeting.
