Furious campaign spending: Koch and Phelan draw funding from widely different arenas

QUINCY – On his birthday in January, Thomas Koch’s sister cut him his first $500 campaign check. The next day he resigned as park commissioner to run for mayor.

In the 10 months since, Koch raised $219,000, more than any candidate for local office in Quincy history, including Mayor William Phelan, his popular third-term rival.

But Phelan is hardly an underdog.

The mayor, who started the year with $189,000 in his war chest, raised an additional $201,584 for a grand total of $391,000.

The campaigns are spending at a furious pace. As of Oct. 19, the deadline to file campaign finance reports before the election Tuesday, Phelan had outspent Koch $290,000 to $174,000.

Both sides took in plenty of $500 donations, the maximum an individual may contribute to candidate each year.

Phelan did well with developers, fellow lawyers and trade unions. Koch found strong support among city unions, friends and family.

Koch got $500 each from Quincy’s police, firefighters and public employees unions. Teachers, though encouraged by union leaders to support Koch, gave no money.

Phelan, by contrast, collected thousands of dollars from unions outside Quincy, including State Police.

One Phelan contributor is millionaire businessman Simon C. Fireman, who paid the largest fine ever imposed in the United States for campaign finance violations – $6 million – after he pleaded guilty to improperly reimbursing employees of his company, Aqua-Leisure Industries, for political contributions. Fireman was a finance vice chairman of Robert Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign. Fireman formerly lived in the Marina Bay section of Quincy.

A name that jumps out on Koch’s list: William Phelan, who gave $500. But the donation was no magnanimous gesture by the mayor, just a Quincy guy with the same name. This one lives on Belmont Street.

Daniel Flynn, the local real-estate investor, and his associates, contributed to Koch.

The Fallon family, founders of the regional ambulance service, backed Phelan. So did businessmen behind the Quarry Hills project, Peter and William O’Connell, Walter Hannon Jr., and Richard McCourt, head of South Boston-based McCourt Construction, the project’s general contractor.

Phelan’s continued criticism that Koch has gotten support from Ralph Maher, the former city plumbing inspector convicted of breaking into city hall shortly after Phelan was elected to his first term in 2001, wasn’t substantiated by the reports.

Maher didn’t donate to Koch but Maher’s son-in-law, Shawn Gaul, gave $500.

John P. Kelly may be reached at jkelly@ledger.com.

Copyright 2007 The Patriot Ledger. Transmitted Friday, November 2, 2007