Photo by Chris Rief aka Spodie Odie

With all the talk of ethics reform and campaign finance over the past few months, a not-so-new idea has been bubbling on the fringes of the conversation—the public financing of campaigns. Well, today it became a much bigger part of the conversation as Councilmember Michael A. Brown (I-At Large) introduced legislation that would allow the city to adopt a successful model used in New York City.

Under his bill, D.C. would create a task force of agencies and experts to create a structure for the public financing of local campaigns. The structure would ideally be similar to New York’s system, he said, which matches every dollar per contributor (up to $175) with $6 in matching funds—all told, $1,050 per contributor.

To qualify, candidates have to meet certain basic criteria—they have to raise a base amount of money—and stick to spending limits. In 2009, a New York City Council candidate couldn’t spend more than $161,000 for their primary race and the same amount for the general election.

The city has faced a variety of campaign finance-related scandals in the last few years, from the $653,000 shadow campaign that benefited Mayor Vince Gray’s 2010 mayoral campaign to an increase in corporate contributions to campaigns—many of them bundled.

Over the past few months there have been a number of proposals that would change the city’s current campaign finance laws. A citizen’s initiative that could appear on the ballot next year would ban corporate donations to local campaigns, while a proposal put forth by Gray would increase disclosure requirements and ban city contractors from donating to local campaigns.

But according to Brown, only public financing could adequately resolve the problems that have become evident in recent years. “[P]ublic financing is best way to address [campaign finance] concerns in a holistic way,” he said today.

Of course, as the City Paper notes, Brown’s current re-election campaign was recently the victim of the theft of $113,000. And New York’s system depends on aggressive audits of campaign spending, something the D.C. Office of Campaign Finance has been less-than-great at.