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wasteful in terms of paper and energy and other natural resources as well as annoying in the mailers, the newspapers and telephone calls. He enjoys sign-waving on the corners, the socials held throughout the town and urged the Council to consider looking at individual contribution limits and individual expenditure committee limits. He liked the voluntary expenditure pledge, which might be a good first step to take and looks forward to hearing more discussion on the matter. Kathy Dowding said in the interest of keeping elections clean, she felt it is imperative to implement voluntary spending limits and asked to find a way to monitor these. She asked for a limit and full disclosure of all contributions and supported keeping the limit at the $25 level. Marjorie Muentz supported contribution limits, expenditure limits, and transparency. Tom Pico said it has not been until the last couple of elections where large monetary contributions have come in and where PACs were being formed and active in terms of making the independent campaign contributions and expenditures. He felt the City should focus on the direct contributions and expenditures as it's hopeless to think about controlling about independent campaign expenditures of the PACs because they operate under different law. He suggested that the focus be on disclosure and asked that Council not mess with the $25 limit or set a cap on expenditures because it gives further advantage to the PACs because they do not have any caps on what they can spend, however if a contribution limit is needed, set something easy to manage, easy to control and use the State limits for assembly campaigns which are reasonable. Mayor Hosterman called for a break at 9:16 p.m. and reconvened the regular meeting at 9:22 p.m. Councilmember Thorne felt the discussion was great, said all five Councilmembers are eligible to run for re-election when their current terms are up as incumbents, said he wanted to be cautious in that campaign finance limitations did tend to favor incumbents; therefore the City should be cautious in how it limits campaign finances. The nature of the job provides Councilmembers with opportunities for invitations to meetings, lunches, dinners, and there is an advantage of being an incumbent. In some cities where there are campaign limitations, if you look and see how many times an incumbent has run un-opposed, it is much larger and much more frequent in Pleasanton. Regarding controlling the amount of money a candidate can get, he cautioned that there are certain things that cannot be limited. He said he has been a recipient of campaign expenditures, it is an odd feeling when you get a piece of mail which is about you and you did not even know it was coming. He felt there is a place in the political process for independent expenditures but limiting the amount of money a candidate can raise in a campaign would severely limit or switch some of the money over to independent expenditures. He said another occurrence seen is that the campaigns will build up a debt and after the election is over, the candidate writes a check to their own campaign and that is how they retire their debt. He said he does believe in transparent reporting and hoped the Council looks into online reporting. Councilmember McGovern asked if there was any way of limiting PAC funding and independent funding contributions to candidates in elections. Ms. Soto said there could be a situation where you limited their contributions, but you cannot limit their overall expenditures. Councilmember McGovern said she was interested in limiting contributions, thinks the community needs to be cognizant of the independent and PAC money that comes to City Council Minutes 9 October 16, 2007