Hometown Heroes spent $66,874.40 supporting eight former Sunnybrook campaign clients

A transaction-by-transaction comparison of Idaho Sunshine’s Sunnybrook Strategies vendor archive with Hometown Heroes’ complete independent-expenditure table identifies eight candidate overlaps. Sunnybrook’s disclosed campaign clients included Stephanie Mickelsen, Rodney Furniss, Jack Nelsen, Gregory Lanting, Chenele Dixon, Treg Bernt, Julie Yamamoto, Mark Sauter and Jim Woodward; Hometown Heroes later reported independent expenditures supporting those candidates. Hometown’s overlapping expenditures total $66,874.40: $27,344.35 in 2024 support for Mickelsen, Furniss, Nelsen, Lanting, Dixon, Bernt, Yamamoto and Sauter, plus $39,530.05 in 2026 support for Mickelsen, Furniss, Sauter and Woodward. Idaho Sunshine identifies Lara Herway as Hometown Heroes’ chairperson and treasurer; Risch Pisca identifies Herway as Sunnybrook Strategies’ founder. Supported conclusion: the PAC Herway formally controls directed a substantial share of its candidate advertising toward politicians who had previously paid Herway’s consulting firm, establishing a verified consultant-client-to-PAC-beneficiary continuity. Evidence firewall: the Sunnybrook payments and Hometown independent expenditures occurred in different cycles and establish overlapping relationships, not unlawful candidate-PAC coordination, candidate direction of Hometown spending, or quid pro quo. Vendor-name variants in the archive remain normalized only at the search-result level, although Risch Pisca independently attributes Sunnybrook to Herway.