OAKLAND — One of the two main groups seeking to remove Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price from office is awash in more than $700,000 of debt, according to the latest campaign finance filings.
The outfit, called Supporters of Recall Pamela Price, is heading into the election’s home stretch with relatively little cash on hand and a growing list of unpaid bills to the petition gatherers, political consultants and accounting firms that helped get the recall question on the Nov. 5 ballot, according to the filings.
The latest financial documents were filed just a week and a half before early voting begins.
The district attorney’s opponents began officially organizing the recall barely six months into Price’s first six-year term, claiming the longtime civil rights attorney was too soft on crime and neglected the needs of crime victims across Alameda County. Price says she hasn’t been given enough time to implement her reforms, which seek to reshape the East Bay’s justice system by taking a stand against the nation’s legacy of mass incarceration.
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As the financial powerhouse of the recall effort, Supporters of Recall Pamela Price has spent nearly $2.4 million since September 2023, when it was organized under the name Reviving the Bay Area.
In that time, it’s received nearly $2.1 million in contributions and loans. The largest single donor to the group has been a well-heeled hedge fund partner who is also almost exclusively bankrolling the effort to recall Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao.
Farallon Capital Management partner Philip Dreyfuss, of Piedmont, has sent Supporters of Recall Pamela Price $590,000 through Sept. 21, campaign finance filings show. About $310,000 of that total came in the form of loans since fall 2023.
He also gave $605,000 to a group called Foundational Oakland Unites, which used $480,000 of that total to help the recall campaign targeting Thao, according to campaign finance filings through June 30. The outfit has yet to file more recent paperwork.
The anti-Price group also appears to have mounting debt.
Supporters of Recall Pamela Price amassed nearly $702,000 in loans or unpaid bills as of Sept. 21, campaign finance filings released Sept. 26 show. Nearly half of that can be attributed to the loans from Dreyfuss, while much of the rest of that debt is owed to fundraising consultants, signature gathering, voter research and campaign consulting, records show.
The tally of unpaid bills includes more than $200,000 to PCI Consultants, a Calabasas-based firm that helps circulate petitions, and about $136,000 owed to Oakland-based Annie Eagan Consulting, for fundraising consulting.
Signature-gathering companies typically operate on a cash-forward basis, given how quickly they typically have to pay people hired to stand in front of stores and ask passersby to sign their petitions, said Jim Ross, an East Bay political consultant who worked on the unsuccessful 2022 campaign to keep San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin in office. In early 2024, as the deadline neared to submit petitions to Alameda County county elections officials, the anti-Price recall campaign paid those gatherers upwards of $9 per valid signature.
The amount of unpaid bills suggests those signature gathering companies “would have only done it with assurances – pretty iron-clad assurances – they would get paid for that work,” Ross said.
“I’ve never encountered in 30 years of doing initiative campaigns, a signature gathering firm that didn’t demand payment up front for the gathering of signatures,” Ross said. “So the only conclusion I can draw from this is the firms have what they feel are iron clad commitments to pay for these funds. And just when the money comes in is the only question.”
Reached by phone Friday afternoon, Annie Eagan said that she was “not OK” with the mounting debt, and that it was “not typical” to be owed so much money. She declined to comment further.
Emails from this newspaper sent to PCI Consultants were not returned.
Attempts by this news organization to directly reach Dreyfuss and leaders of Supporters of Recall Pamela Price were not successful.
The group’s mounting bills come as its fundraising slowed considerably in recent months. Just $120,000 of its fundraising haul came since April 1, at which point the group had finished gathering signatures to put the issue on the ballot.
Much of the money it raised over the past six months came from a Washington-based property management company called Holland Residential, which donated $50,000. Another $30,000 came from the Marin-County based Revitalize East Bay Committee, while Pacific Gas & Electric donated $20,000 to the group. Northern California District Council of Laborers PAC and the Construction & General Laborers’ Local 304 each donated $10,000 to the cause.
Over the past week, the Deputy Sheriffs Association of Alameda County has given $20,000 and the San Leandro police union chipped in $7,500, campaign finance records show. The Revitalize East Bay Committee, whose funding source is not yet known, has poured in $95,000 more.
The Supporters group has been the strongest financial backer of the entity that officially organized the recall effort, called Save Alameda For Everyone. The latest financial filings for that group, also known as SAFE, finally appeared on the county’s elections website on Wednesday.
SAFE reported receiving $11,864 in contributions from July 1 through Sept. 21. It has a cash balance of $6,391 with less than six weeks before election day, filings dated Sept. 26 show. Their spending has also slowed, even as the campaign has held rallies and on Wednesday received a big endorsement from Congressman Eric Swalwell, a former county prosecutor who has represented the suburban parts of Alameda County for six terms.
Over the summer, SAFE reported having $508,000 in debt itself, almost entirely owed to the signature-gathering company PCI Consultants. However, Chris Moore, the campaign manager for SAFE, said Friday that all but nearly $16,000 of that was due to a clerical mix-up, when bills that had already been paid were recorded as debt. The filing from last week confirmed SAFE had debt of $15,726.
Combined, the two leading pro-recall outfits have out-raised Price’s campaign. The district attorney’s Protect the Win campaign brought in about $354,000 since the start of 2023, including nearly $110,000 from July 1 through Sept. 21.
