Yudelka Tapia’s path to becoming an elected official hit a massive roadblock last week when a judge upheld the New York City Campaign Finance Board’s decision to hold her accountable for more than $100,000 in violation penalties and reimbursement payments stemming from a troubled and unsuccessful City Council campaign in 2009.

Up until last week, Tapia, the female district leader in the west Bronx’s 86th Assembly District, was running in the crowded race for the 15th District City Council seat, which includes the Fordham-Bedford area and is opening up with the departure of term-limited majority leader Joel Rivera.

Tapia is now turning her attention to the open 86th District assembly seat recently vacated by Nelson Castro, who left office in March when it was revealed that he had become a government informant after being indicted himself on perjury charges back in 2009.

But Tapia, a longtime community activist who started the Bronx’s first Dominican political club, is now drowning in debt and carries a tainted record of mismanaging public funds.

During and following her 2009 run in the 14th Council District, which she lost to Fernando Cabrera, Tapia racked up 12 campaign finances violations for a total of $47,774 in penalties. The violations included, among other things, making late filings or not making required filings, accepting money from a corporation, not reporting expenditures and not responding to draft reports.

Because she failed to provide documentation on time, the board is also holding her responsible for repaying $59,930.86 in public matching funds, in addition to the penalities.

“We are pleased that the Court upheld the Board’s enforcement actions concerning this campaign,” said Matt Sollars, a spokesperson for the campaign finance board. “Candidates who violate the City’s campaign finance laws face significant penalties and public funds repayment obligations.”

Sick Days

Though she has already “terminated” her campaign’s registry with the city’s campaign finance board, Tapia says she will appeal the ruling. Leo Glickman, Tapia’s lawyer, said Tapia is being punished too severely for simply being late in filing documentation. He said the delay in filing was due to a severe illness suffered by Tapia’s treasurer, who is also her son.

Although the campaign didn’t file documentation accounting for nearly $60,000 in taxpayer funding until this past December (which was not considered by the board because of its lateness), Glickman says it would show the funds were spent properly.

Glickman declined to provide the documentation to the Norwood News, saying the board should have it on file as public record. The board said it would not release the documents without a Freedom of Information Law request, which was filed on Tuesday, but may take several weeks to be answered.

During an emotional appeal hearing in front of the board on Jan. 29, Tapia and her son, Jorge Javier, who was 20 years old and also her campaign treasurer back in 2009, tried to explain the circumstances surrounding their non-compliance.

Like three of Tapia’s four sons, Javier said he suffers from kidney disease and began to reject a transplant in June of 2009, causing him to be “severely ill for a portion of this time” that the campaign failed to document its expenditures.

Tapia said Javier’s health setback plunged her son into a “deep depression,” which also led to therapy. At the same time, she said her husband lost his job and she was forced to take care of her grandson.

The problems coping with the illness and other “family dynamics” reached “a fever pitch and now we’re here,” Javier told the board.

Tapia, who has been an auditor in the city comptroller’s office since 1999, said she “didn’t have the knowledge” to respond to requests for documentation on her own campaign’s audit.

Tapia and Glickman both said they expected to be fined for their mistakes in filing documentation late, but Tapia maintained that “there was nothing wrong with the campaign” itself.

The Board, however, didn’t buy the excuse, saying their office gave Tapia more than three years to respond to requests for documentation and held a public hearing last October, which Tapia did not attend, to discuss the matter.

In February, Tapia took the case to State Supreme Court. Last Tuesday, Judge Sharon A.M. Aarons upheld the Board’s actions against her, saying regardless of what the documents contained, the board was well within its rights not to accept them.

An Audit Unanswered

In November of 2009, following the campaign, the board began an audit into how Tapia’s campaign used the matching funds she received through the program.

When the board asked for documentation, Tapia’s campaign didn’t respond. The board granted the campaign four additional extensions to allow them to file the proper documents and the campaign failed to file them. On Dec. 27, 2012, Tapia’s campaign filed a petition to appeal her violations. It was at that time, Glickman said, she filed the documentation showing where the campaign funds went.

Victor Solis suspected something was wrong with Tapia’s campaign before it received the nearly $80,000 in public matching funds in August of 2009, which is when the campaign stopped filing disclosure reports to the board.

Solis, an operative in several successful political campaigns, including Mayor Bloomberg’s first re-election campaign in 2004, said Tapia approached him to help with her 2009 Council run. He obliged and created a report for her that contained “the menu” for how to get elected. It included extensive demographic and voter information.

While working on the campaign, Solis noticed that “nobody” would show up to her fundraisers. Still, numerous contributors would be registered as coming from those same fundraisers. He said many of her listed contributors were college students and seniors — both groups of people who don’t have money to spend on campaigns, he noted.

“I saw a lot of irregularities,” Solis said. “One thing didn’t match the other.”

Solis, who maintains he was never paid for his work on the campaign, said he asked Tapia about the irregularities and she brushed him off, saying she knew what she was doing.

Under the city’s matching funds program, for every donation of $175 or less reported by the candidate, the campaign finance board matches it 6 to 1. (For examples, a $100 donation would be worth another $600 in city funding.)

It is illegal to create the illusion of multiple contributors to boost a campaign’s matching funds total. Queens City Council candidate Al Baldeo was indicted by federal prosecutors this past fall on charges that he paid people to donate to his campaign so he could get matching funds from the city.

The campaign finance board would not comment on whether Tapia’s case had been referred to law enforcement officials.

That summer, Solis said he helped secure a $5,000 loan for Tapia that she refused to pay back for more than three years. This past Monday, at 9:30 p.m., she finally paid back the loan, Solis said.

Switching Races

The campaign finance penalties don’t preclude Tapia from running for office at the city or state level, but she won’t be able to participate in the city’s matching funds program until she repays the matching funds that weren’t considered “qualified expenditures” and the $47,774 in fines. (Because he was treasurer, Tapia’s son is also responsible for paying back the fines.)

Last Wednesday, according to the state Board of Elections website, Tapia filed her January 2013 campaign finance report. She reported $16,378 in contributions and $1,293.33 in expenditures. The state doesn’t have a matching funds program.

Tapia recently hired a political consulting firm called Red Horse Strategies, which is also working on Ritchie Torres’ run for the 15th Council District, to help out on her assembly campaign.

Matthew Rey and Doug Forand, both consultants at Red Horse, said it was easy for campaigns to fall into problems and incur penalties considering “the arcane and Byzantine” complexities of the city’s campaign finance board regulations. Many campaigns hire experts just to deal with all the paperwork and filing deadlines, they said. Like other candidates who run afoul of these guidelines, they said Tapia would set up a repayment plan.

Anyone insinuating that Tapia was involved in an illegal matching funds scheme (often called a “straw donor scheme”) is “unequivocally” wrong, Rey said. Tapia’s problems, he added, are “simply administrative.”

Solis, who works for the department of education when not moonlighting in politics, said he was happy to see the campaign finance board come down on Tapia. “The people in the Bronx need to know who’s trying to represent them,” he said. “They need to know.”

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the May 16-29 print edition of the Norwood News.

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Welcome to the Norwood News, a bi-weekly community newspaper that primarily serves the northwest Bronx communities of Norwood, Bedford Park, Fordham and University Heights. Through our Breaking Bronx blog, we focus on news and information for those neighborhoods, but aim to cover as much Bronx-related news as possible. Founded in 1988 by Mosholu Preservation Corporation, a not-for-profit affiliate of Montefiore Medical Center, the Norwood News began as a monthly and grew to a bi-weekly in 1994. In September 2003 the paper expanded to cover University Heights and now covers all the neighborhoods of Community District 7. The Norwood News exists to foster communication among citizens and organizations and to be a tool for neighborhood development efforts. The Norwood News runs the Bronx Youth Journalism Heard, a journalism training program for Bronx high school students. As you navigate this website, please let us know if you discover any glitches or if you have any suggestions. We’d love to hear from you. You can send e-mails to norwoodnews@norwoodnews.org or call us anytime (718) 324-4998.