Charlottesville Democrat David Toscano, who is running against Clement “Kim” Tingley and my man Rich Collins for the Democratic nomination for the 57th House of Delegates seat, displays a noteworthy pattern of evading the truth in his latest campaign filing with the state board of elections.
Toscano has come under some criticism for accepting the lion’s share of his campaign funding from developers and the growth industry — C-Ville Weekly noted this a few weeks ago. Inspecting his latest filing, it seems that he hasn’t stopped accepting so much money from developers, he’s simply started mislabeling it.
Consider Bob Hauser. He owns Hauser Homes, and he’s probably the most well-known developer in town. He builds your basic blah suburban houses — garage cleverly disguised as a weird sticky-outy part of the house, faux-aged brick, chimneys that don’t necessarily correlate with fireplaces, front doors that aren’t really used because people come in through the garage, etc. I’m not criticizing the guy — this is what people want. (In fact, my father-in-law worked for Hauser for many years.) As Hauser’s website attests, he’s built 1,500 houses in Charlottesville and Albemarle County in the past 20 years.
In David Toscano’s filings, Bob Hauser is not a “developer.” He’s not a “builder.” He’s not even a “contractor.” He’s a “business person.”
A lot of people are “business persons.” Bill Ditmar. He’s a prominent developer. Doug Easter. He runs a lobbying firm for the growth industry. Vito Cetta. Another builder. Jack Horn. He owns Martin/Horn Construction. Of the few “business persons” that I don’t know to be developers or in the industry, nearly all of them are strangers to me — I only know one “business person” to be something other than a developer.
Anybody who’s lived in Charlottesville for any length of time could look at this list and know full well that these guys are developers. So why do it? Because this way, when VPAP aggregates the data, their substantial contributions won’t count as being from the real estate industry, and the total will be suppressed. In his last filing, such subterfuge was used, but suppressed. Most folks in the development industry were more or less identified as such. Once bitten, twice shy?
Now, David Toscano is a smart guy, and he’s running the same small HoD campaign that the rest of us are running. He knows better than to fudge his reports. It’s too small of a town for that, and he’s too nice of a guy to be playing this game.