Editor:

While Ryan Emenaker's editorial ("A False Sense Of Reform," Oct. 2) was informative and interesting, if a bit dry, it fails to address the critical issue of campaign spending limits.

As I have pointed out in a previous letter to the Journal, campaign contribution limits can be fudged in a variety of ways. It is not uncommon for a large company to make a contribution of $1,500 in the company's name and then the V.P. of said company gives $1,000 in her name and so forth. A single business interest can often give a total far higher than $1,500 and nothing can be done to stop that. That makes setting limits only with no cap on spending a joke no matter what the size of the limits are. Surely Professor Emenaker must know that.

The only way to make donation limits effective is to also set campaign spending limits. For Humboldt County a donation limit of $500 coupled with a spending limit of $50,000 should be more than sufficient and would, at least to some extent, cut back on the current out of bounds amount of influence that some corporate interests currently have on our leadership. Perhaps more importantly it would open the door to potential candidates who do not have ties to big business interests.

Most importantly, this decision should be taken out of the hands of the supervisors and put to the public since the supervisors have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.

Sylvia De Rooy, Indianola