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Dan Maes, a Republican and one-time Tea Party favorite whose campaign for governor imploded earlier this year, spent nearly one-third of his total campaign donations on himself and expenses associated with his family. Maes paid himself $66,235 in the form of mileage reimbursements, a practice that led to a campaign finance complaint against him while he was running, according to The Denver Post. No other candidate was close to reimbursing himself so much. “We put in an enormous amount of travel. That’s how we accomplished what we did,” says Maes, who finished third in the gubernatorial contest with 11 percent of the vote. Tom Tancredo, the former Republican congressman who ran with the American Constitution Party, reimbursed himself $13,762 over the course of his campaign.
“If you have to make a choice between sending out a campaign piece or repaying yourself mileage, well, everybody makes those decisions for themselves,” Tancredo says. Hickenlooper, for his part, did not reimburse himself for mileage. Maes also paid his daughter Jordan a $2,000 bonus, added to the $1,300 monthly salary she earned for keeping his scheduling, driving, and other work.
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Meanwhile, when it comes to racking up miles, B-cycle, Denver’s large-scale bike-sharing program that Maes criticized as a United Nations conspiracy, logged nearly 103,000 rides since its launch on April 22. The program, which was shut down for the winter earlier this week, will reopen next March, notes the Denver Daily News.