Dan Seals Pays $1000 a Month for His Commute to the 10th District (UPDATED)

Dan Seals, the Democratic candidate for Illinois' 10th Congressional District, doesn't live in the 10th District, as we've noted time and again, for some years now. He's never moved in, despite the fact that he can't vote for himself (he actually lives in Jan Schakowsky's district, but could never beat her in a primary), and every cycle (this is his third try for the seat) he hands his opponent - first Mark Kirk and now Bob Dold - a juicy campaign issue.

We've talked about this so much that even I'm sick of the harping on it, although I found it interesting that as recently as last week, the Lake County News-Sun felt compelled to ding Dan once again on the issue, even as they gave him their endorsement.

So, we were content to let it lie, and allow 10th District voters to once again decide for themselves is this is an issue or not, until we noticed while looking through Dan Seals' FEC campaign disclosures that Dan buys a lot of gas every month for his commute into the 10th District from his home in the 9th District, even though it's only a few blocks, as Seals' defenders always like to point out.

And I mean A LOT of gas.

We've known that Dan Seals has a thing for gas ever since his ill-fated "gas for votes" stunt that failed miserably last cycle, and got him in a whole lot of hot water with Lincolnshire police, as Team America readers well remember.

But now we find that Dan Seals has been getting reimbursed, on average, about $1000 EVERY MONTH since January, for his gasoline expense. Check out the monthly reimbursements (with filing links) below:

"Jan auto reimbursement", $1112.00
"Feb auto reimbursement", $1009.00
"March auto reimbursement", $994.50
"April auto reimbursement", $1132.00
"May auto reimbursement", $1018.50

"June auto reimbursement", $1059.50
"July auto reimbursement", $1006.00
"August auto reimbursement", $1078.00

By the way, this is all apparently personal reimbursement to Dan, as his other campaign workers also get specific reimbursements for things like their auto expenses, medical insurance, etc. So, doing the math, if you take $1000 worth of gas a month, assuming about $3.00 a gallon, that's using about 333 gallons a month. If Seals' car gets about 20 miles to the gallon (I assume being the 'green' kind of guy he is, he probably drives a hybrid, so I think 20 miles is probably pretty conservative), that means that Seals is driving a whopping 6,600 miles a month, or over 200 miles a day. That's an awful lot of round trips around the 10th District, PER DAY.

Now, I suppose Seals could be leasing a car and is being reimbursed for that (although I suspect his supporters might look quite askance at that kind of use of their donated campaign funds), but even supposing the campaign is paying for a $500/month Beemer for our frugal man-of-the-people candidate (and I have no idea if that's the case), that's still around a hundred miles a day in gas expenses, EVERY DAY of the month.

Seals has been called out before for paying himself living expenses out of his campaign fund. Is he really using this much petrol exclusively for his campaign efforts, or is something else going on here, folks?

UPDATED 10/20/10 6:30 a.m.: I did some more looking at Seals' FEC filings last night and came away with two other interesting observations:

First, if you look at the entries for 'auto reimbursement' for 2010, the checks for the first three months, January, February and March, were all cut to Seals on the same day, April 21, 2010 (he then started being more timely with cutting monthly reimbursement checks to himself the rest of 2010). Odd - Seals was keeping his car/gas/mileage/whatever-he-did records for those months but decided to sit on them until April? Didn't he famously complain about how he's not a "millionaire" who can't personally afford to move into the District -- but now he can eat $3000 of car expense for several months until he gets around to asking his campaign for the money back? Moreover, didn't a Seals sycophant recently make a similar complaint about something similar with Bob Dold not timely accounting for expenses in his campaign?

Second, I went back to the FEC filings and as far as I can tell, Seals did not claim any auto reimbursements in 2009, despite the fact that he announced his third try for this congressional seat way back in July 2009.

So, let's get this straight: in 2009, the beginning of this campaign cycle for Seals, he claims no auto reimbursements that entire year. He was locked in a tight battle with State Rep. Julie Hamos for the February 2010 Dem primary, which he won by the slimmest of margins. So, he was definitely campaigning his guts out (or at least what passes for that for Seals). Then, in April of 2010, he makes a retroactive claim to his campaign for three months worth of 2010 car expenses, with amounts eerily consistent every single month, showing that from nothing in 2009, he instantly started driving around the District to the tune of roughly a $1000 a month in 2010, and continued this level of consistency, based on the monthly average, the rest of 2010?

And don't tell me that Seals is new to this and only just now, in 2010, figured out to reimburse himself for his campaign car expenses. He's been campaigning for this seat for five years, has moved millions of dollars through his campaign account, and even knows how to pay himself a salary out of his campaign fund when he needed to.

Folks, something about this just ain't right.