Knuuttila gives back money after breaking finance law

Supporters sent $860 to him after reading campaign letter

By Owen Boss

The state Office of Campaign and Political Finance recently ruled that local state Senate candidate Brian A. Knuuttila violated state campaign finance laws by signing a letter that solicited money for his campaign. After notifying the state office of the error, Mr. Knuuttila returned all of the money he received. Greg Birne, general counsel for the office said that the fundraising was in direct violation of Section 13 of state finance laws, but because the violation was rapidly corrected, the penalties will not be as severe as they could have been. “Section 13 states that no person employed for compensation by the commonwealth or any of its subdivisions, other than an elected officer, may directly or indirectly solicit to receive political contributions for any political purpose,” said Mr. Birne. “We’ve asked them to provide copies of the canceled checks, and for now the investigation is potentially closed. There are a lot of different ways that we can resolve these cases. The most severe are sent to the attorney general’s office, but this is not one of those cases.” Mr. Knuuttila said that when he realized that a mistake had been made, he immediately contacted the state office in an attempt to right the problem. “We found out about it on the 16th or 17th of March, and by the 20th we already had a letter sent into their office,” said Mr. Knuuttila. “The Office of Campaign and Political Finance thanked us for being honest and up front about the mistake. Apparently they have seen similar mistakes made where that isn’t the case, we did everything they asked us to do.” Mr. Knuuttila said that he has agreed to return the $860 he raised from the solicitation letter, and has since provided the state office with copies of the canceled checks so that they know the money has been completely refunded. “When we discovered that some of the letters we had sent out had a paragraph included that was asking for financial support, the people who had mailed them felt really bad about it, but not a single one of them said ‘Let’s just let this ride’; we were all concerned about how we could quickly fix the problem,” said Mr. Knuuttila, “and that is something that I am proud of.” oboss@thegardnernews.com

Appeared on Page 1 on 5/2/2008 (Vol. 206 No. 105)