Filing Shows Lots of Small Donors Fuel Avella's Dinky Campaign

By Roy Edroso Wed., Jul. 15 2009 at 3:14 PM

Categories: Citystate, Featured, Mayoral Race 2009, Politics, The Money Trail

Last week Mike Bloomberg came across with some money stats from his self-financed campaign. Bill Thompson and Tony Avella, whose mayoral candidacies are not, to say the least, self-financed, and supposed to file their data for the past quarter this week. Avella's is posted now, and it shows that he's spending out his modest funds: in April he had $176,925.71, and since then has raised $22,651 but spent $142,167.61. No permanent campaign war-chest for him!

Among the interesting details: Avella has a lot of contributors giving $10, $25, and other two-figure amounts. 55 donors gave him $100, and only one guy, Gerald Antonacci of Plainview, gave him as much as $1,000. Avella's expenses has mostly been on typical campaign stuff ("$1,385... Catering") and things we're sure make sense to campaign finance experts ("$460.34... Advance Repayment"). The biggest ticket, $20,000, was for fundraising consultants.

All this is puny compared to his rivals' resources. Thompson has millions in his treasury, and Bloomberg pisses money. On the other hand, Avella's still getting the kind of publicity money can't buy from the local press (Newsday: "Little-known Democrat still in NYC mayor's race"). So who knows? Maybe it'll all even out!

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