Fracking billionaires inject money into McCoy campaign
Taking a stop along the money trail…
TEXAS MONEY GUSHING IN FOR ROB McCOY -- When I wrote a report in The Star on the most recent campaign finance reports of candidates for state office, I noted that 44th Assembly District candidate Rob McCoy had received a lot of contributions from the state of Texas.
McCoy responded to me he was pleased that fact was reported, saying it is evidence of the number of frustrated Californians who have fled the state in search of better employment opportunities in Texas. McCoy speaks of an exodus of Californians to Texas as a “diaspora” — an involuntary dispersion of population.
But McCoy’s biggest contributors are hardly refugees from California — they are homegrown Texas billionaires who built up an oil service company specializing in fracking, called Frac Tech, and then reaped a fortune when they sold it three years ago. In a 2011 article listing Dan and Farris Wilks as among the nation’s “undercover billionaires,” Forbes reported that the brothers netted $3.2 billion from the sale.
Dan and Farris Wilks of Cisco Texas
The Wilks brothers and their wives are no strangers to contributing to campaigns of state legislative candidates. The National Institute on Money in State Politics reports that in 2012 they contributed a collective total of more than $50,000 to 70 percent of the Republicans in the Montana Legislature.
In March, the brothers and their wives combined to contribute $15,200 to the campaign of McCoy, the pastor at Godspeak Calvary Chapel in Newbury Park.
In this instance, the interest of the Wilks brothers is likely not fracking policy in California, but rather their religious belief that evangelical Christians need to become more engaged in politics, and their association with an organization called Pastors and Pews, which seeks to recruit evangelical pastors to run for public office. As Forbes reports, Farris Wilks is himself is a pastor.
The liberal blog Crooks and Liars reported on this in February, in a post that includes a video with comments from the brothers. In it, Dan Wilks speaks of an imperative “to bring the Bible back into schools” and Farris Wilks notes that schoolchildren “are being taught other ideas — the gay agenda — out in the real world.”
Since filing his last report, McCoy has continued to take in big checks from Texas. Late contribution reports show three contributions from the Lone Star state in April for a total of $7,300. Among them was another $1,600 from Staci Wilks, bringing the Wilks’ families’ total contributions to McCoy so far to $16,800, or more than 10 percent of the total contributions he has raised.
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