Always follow the money!

It's an old investigative reporter's maxim. If you follow the money, that's where you'll find the story.

Only in 2006, in the Flower Mound mayor's race, there's not much money to follow. Both candidates were required to file two campaign-finance disclosure reports - one on the 30th day before the election, the other on the 8th day before the election. Both reports have now been filed, and thanks to the lightning-quick service of Ginger at the Town Secretary's office, I've got both candidates' reports in hand now.

Totalling the 30-day and 8-day reports, here's the spending totals for this race:

Jody Smith = $5677.89
Jim Lang = $7528.74

I'm trying to remember how much Jody and Stephanie Spruill spent in 2004. Wasn't it $15,000, $20,000, perhaps $25,000 per candidate? Different times, huh?

A couple of years ago, I asked the Town to post these reports to their website. They do tell you a lot about who's contributing to these campaigns, and how the candidates are spending their campaign cash. They haven't done that yet, but since Ginger was able to e-mail these PDFs to me tonight, I'll post them on this site. (Reminder: these become PUBLIC documents the moment they are filed, ready for inspection at the Town Secretary's office, so there should be no expectation of privacy.) You should take a moment to read them. I didn't see any smoking gun in these 4 reports (though you never know until you look, do you?).

Here's Jody Smith's 30 day report and her 8 day report.

Here's Jim Lang's 30 day report and his 8 day report.

You'll need Adobe Acrobat to view these files, but you probably knew that already.