The Money Race for Richardson ISD

Candidates file campaign finance reports 30 days before elections. For the Richardson ISD, that means all candidates for Board of Trustees have filed reports. In recent posts, I looked at the money races for Richardson mayor and the Richardson City Council. In this post, I'll focus on the two races in Richardson ISD.

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Here's how the field looks 30 days out, ranked by total political contributions:

Total Political Contributions

Eric Eager	Place 6	$2,484.14
Debbie Renteria	District 3	$2,226.43
Blake Sawyer	Place 6	$1,967.37
Bonnie Abadie	District 3	$1,205.00

The two incumbents (Eager and Renteria) lead in contributions, but the totals are tiny compared to a year ago, when one candidate alone (Sherry Clemens) had raised $30,242 by this point, not counting PAC money raised in support of Clemens's campaign. Our mailboxes are likely to be less stuffed with political mailers this year.

Let's look at the sources of the money the candidates did raise.

Eric Eager lists seven donors, two of whom caught my eye. One is former RISD trustee Justin Bono. The other is Eric Eager himself, who contributed $200 of his own money to his campaign.

Bonnie Abadie lists only six contributors, but among them are some doozies. First is Lynn Davenport, who ran for RISD trustee herself in 2017, and lost, then ran for Dallas College District 1 trustee in 2022, and lost again. She's all over social media and podcasts warning about conspiracies that threaten our privacy, our freedoms, or something. (By the way, in her own run for RISD trustee, Lynn Davenport was fined $250 by the Texas Ethics Commission because she "did not properly disclose political contributions in the 30-day and 8-day pre-election reports for the May 6, 2017, election." But that was Davenport, not Abadie.) Another contributor is Lauren Davis, who ran for Dallas County Judge on an anti-vax platform, and also lost. Abadie's biggest contributor is Darrell Day. A search of The Wheel's archives turns up a story from 2010 on a Dallas Morning News report about a new PAC in Richardson city politics called the Richardson Citizens Alliance. The far-right PAC supported candidates in that year's city elections, and all lost. The PAC soon disappeared. All of this is not a good track record for Abadie, who ran for RISD trustee herself, twice, finishing a distant third both times in three person races. Third time's the charm?

Debbie Renteria lists nineteen donors, two of whom caught my eye. One is former RISD trustee Kristin Kuhne, who coincidentally defeated Lynn Davenport when Davenport ran for RISD trustee. The other is Catalina E. Garcia, Dallas College District 1 trustee, who coincidentally defeated Lynn Davenport when they opposed each other for that position in 2022.

Blake Sawyer lists seven donors, two of whom caught my eye. The most notable contribution is $1,000.00 from Sherry Clemens, who raised over $30,000 last year in her own losing effort. The other is Randall Blankenship, a frequent speaker at RISD board meetings, who picked up an information packet for candidates this year, but didn't file to run himself.