Cornish counted lodging for Prison Population Task Force meeting as campaign expenditure

The Minnesota Senate Daily Schedule for Friday, December 18, 2015 listed one meeting:

Friday, December 18, 2015

Committee on Judiciary

Chair: Sen. Ron Latz 09:00 AM Room 10 State Office Bldg. The meeting is of the Prison Population Task Force, an informal discussion among a group of stakeholders including members of the House and Senate, officials from state and local agencies, among others. Rep. Tony Cornish is the co-chair of the meeting.

Agenda:   The discussion will focus on county-based supervision and diversion programs, probation revocation, and offender re-entry services.

The informal discussion was covered by nonpartisan House staffer Mike Cook at Session Daily in Prison task force looks at recidivism prevention ideas. Co-chair Tony Cornish, R-Vernon Center, wasn't buying the idea of spending money on recidivism prevention programs, Cook reports:

Not all task force members are on board for providing additional dollars.

Cornish said he’d like to see more evidence of success before added money is given.

It's clearly a nonpartisan legislative meeting, however informal. However, if one looks at Representative Cornish's 2015 campaign finance report, getting a hotel room related to the early morning meeting is a campaign expense:

We would think Cornish and his treasurer would know better about this sort of expenditure, which can be charged to a campaign committee as a non-campaign disbursement, as the Cornish committee did with a similar cost of serving in the legislature, mileage to attend a hearing on RealID:

It's actually surprising that the House itself doesn't reimburse lawmakers for these sorts of expenses for hearings held at the state capitol complex, especially for committee chairs like Cornish since the work is connected to the tasks he and others do in the course of policy making.

Whatever the case, we emailed Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board director Gary Goldsmith to ask about the reporting of the hotel lodging as a campaign expense. His emailed response was quite simple: "I would expect that kind of expense to be reported as a noncampaign disbursement for costs of serving in office."

The peculiar expenditures that we saw with his campaign expenditure for birthday pies in Delicious! Representative Cornish's birthday pies for House colleagues were campaign expenditure doesn't seem isolated.

Photo: Rep. Tony Cornish, nattily dressed in a camo jacket. Screengrab via The Uptake.

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