September 30, 2009 02:14 AM UTC

Diggs Brown returning soon to Fort Collins, likely launching congressional campaign

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• by: BobMoore

Former Fort Collins City Council member Diggs Brown will be returning home from a year of active Army duty in the next few weeks, and all signs point to him formally announcing a Republican congressional campaign shortly thereafter. But he’ll have a lot of fundraising ground to make up if he’s going to be a viable candidate.

“Draft Diggs is winding down in a few short weeks… then it’s showtime!” according to a post Tuesday on Twitter by the Draft Diggs Brown for Congress Committee, which has been pushing Brown’s all-but-official candidacy while he’s out of the country.

Brown is a Special Forces major in the Colorado Army National Guard who began a year-long active duty assignment last fall. Federal law prohibits him from engaging in political activity while on active duty, so the Draft Diggs committee has been raising funds and trying to get Brown’s message out in his absence.

If and when Brown declares his candidacy, he’ll face a steep uphill climb. The Republican frontrunner for the 4th Congressional District seat, state Rep. Cory Gardner of Yuma, almost certainly will have raised more than $500,000 before Brown collects his first dime. Gardner also is part of the National Republican Congressional Committee’s “Young Guns” program, which has helped raise Gardner’s national profile.

More below the fold. Also, see my Coloradoan blog for links: http://bit.ly/1dcHxa

The winner from the GOP field, which also includes University of Colorado Regent Tom Lucero, will take on Democratic incumbent Betsy Markey.

The original plan for the Draft Diggs committee was to raise money that could then be turned over to a Brown campaign committee. That would help offset Gardner’s fundraising head start. But that’s not going to happen.

A July letter to the Draft Diggs committee from the Federal Election Commission essentially put an end to that idea, saying the committee had to recategorize its filing status. The committee quickly filed amended campaign finance reports for the first and second quarters. The filings switched Draft Diggs from an “authorized” candidate committee to an “unauthorized” one.

(As an aside, the Lucero campaign also got nastygrams Sept. 15 from the FEC saying its first two quarterly disclosures were littered with significant mistakes.)

Getting back to Draft Diggs, the upshot was that the committee gave up on plans to transfer money to an eventual Brown candidacy, said Andrew Boucher, a Fort Collins political consultant who’s been one of the leaders of the Draft Diggs effort.

“We would have had to get an advisory opinion from the FEC in order to do that, because it’s not defined,” Boucher said. “The FEC people who walked us through setting up the campaign didn’t seem to think that in January, but I was told that there’s a difference between the ‘information’ department at the FEC and the ‘compliance’ department at the FEC. So the simpler/recommended option is to just fold up the draft entity and start over.”

The Draft Diggs committee plans to contribute $5,000 to the Brown candidate committee once it’s established, the maximum legal amount an unauthorized committee can send to a candidate’s authorized committee, Boucher said.

He said the Draft Diggs committee performed its primary function, which was to raise Brown’s visibility until he could return home. The committee created a Web site and sent frequent e-mails to potential supporters. But it didn’t send out fundraising letters after July, when it became clear the committee wouldn’t be able to give more than $5,000 to Brown.

FEC records show that the Draft Diggs committee raised about $52,000 in the first six months of the year, with about $36,000 coming from the Fort Collins business community.

Those records also showed that the committee had spent all but $9,500 of what it raised by the end of June, when it still had plans of turning over money to Brown. About half of the committee’s spending went to two sources — $12,500 to Boucher’s company, Boucher Strategies; and $10,500 to Denver political consultant Andy Nickel. Boucher said the work was performed at a steep discount.