Thursday is the day that the much-loved community paper "The Irvine World News" appears in driveways across Irvine.  This Thursday, like last Thursday, Larry Agran's slate mailer, "Irvine Community News and Views" also appeared in Irvine mail boxes, doing it's darndest to  impersonate a newpaper.  The Agran mailer is even printed on newsprint a similar size to the "World News."

Mailing an eight-page 4-color separation to a city with 200,000 residents is expensive.  How expensive? I estimate this mailer campaign will easily cost the Agran slate over $200,000 through election day.   

Given that individual contributions for Irvine municipal races are capped at $410, where does all this money come from? ---

Here is how I computed my cost estimate.  Please offer corrections or refinements in the comments.

Irvine's current population is 202,079,  so I conservatively estimate 50,000 pieces for each mailing.  My neighborhood of Woodbridge averages one mailing address per three residents. 

The best on-line estimate I found for an oversize 4-color eight-page printing was $3,500 per 10,000 pieces plus a $1,000 setup fee.  Therefore my guess for the printing cost is

 $18,500 = 50,000 pieces x   $0.35/piece + $1,000

This kind of mailer is "barcode, pre-paid flat" in the language of the post office, so the postage is probably $0.35/ piece for commercial mailings, or $0.22/piece if non-profit. If we generously assume the slate mailing committee wangled the non-profit rate, then postage runs $11,000 for each mailing (50,000 x $0.22).

That adds up to $29,500 for each mailing. There are additional costs for pre-sorting the mailing (each piece is individually addressed), and of course someone has to write, edit, and layout the material. So there are definitely more costs that I haven't included. On the other hand,  a veteran pol like Larry should be able to get better printing rates than I can find on the internet.  So I'll knock my estimate down to $25,000 per mailing.  

That means the Agran slate has burned through at least $50,000 on just these two slate mailers.  There are seven more Thursdays between now and Election day, so it will cost another $175,000 to keep the Agran slate mailer appearing weekly in Irvine mailboxes.