Arnulfo Hernandez & Ethics Complaints

So hey, while we are talking about ethics complaints filed by Tamayo's financial contributors, lets talk about Arnulfo Hernandez.

He's the guy who recently ran for City Council District 6 with basically no voting record in El Paso because he recently moved back to El Paso from California.

Now everyone knows you gotta meet residency requirements before you run for most offices - certainly city council. The state is a bit more complicated, thus Tamayo's ability to run for HD76 even though she's been living mostly in Austin.

Anywho - November the 5th was the last scheduled city election and it was the election to replace out-going City Rep Claudia Ordaz Perez. Arnulfo Hernandez ran in that election.

Which means he would've had to meet the city's residency requirements in order to be eligible to run for the seat.

Which makes these entries on two separate finance reports - of two separate candidates - pretty damn interesting.

This screenshot is from the January Semi-Annual report of Elisa Tamayo:

And this screenshot is from the January Semi-Annual report of Cesar Blanco:

What is interesting is that these are two different reports and two different contribution dates as you can see. Now look at what I highlighted.

Both indicate Hernandez's address as Carmichael, California and not El Paso, Texas. The way this usually works is that you make a contribution and someone either captures your information about your occupation, employer, and address at the time of the donation or later when the finance report is being made.

This is almost always done by asking the contributor for their address. So it doesn't strike anyone as strange that a candidate for an El Paso City Council seat apparently made a contribution to a candidate - on Election Day of the campaign he was running in no less - with an out-of-town, let alone out-of-state address?

Again, he's aligned with Max Grossman and was used in one of Grossman's weaponizing ethics complaints schemes - and his complaints were also thrown out. As I recall, in addition to being a financial contributor to the Tamayo campaign, Hernandez is also an attorney.

So it is more than a little funny that part of the reason his ethics complaint was kicked out was because he was referring to a law that doesn't exist.

I think going forward that the next time Grossman starts weaponizing ethics complaints, that the media should check is interest in campaigns and finance reports to see if the person filing the ethics complaint is contributing to, or getting paid by, a political campaign.

Man, this election cycle was fun.