Shaking Down or Institutional Corruption?

There is a fact of life that is very hard for many local elected officials to admit:  most of the campaign contributions given to incumbents and serious challengers come from two sources:  those seeking special benefits from the government and those who work for the government (and their unions). If both of these groups were not permitted to make campaign contributions, local elections would be contested with very little money, unless the government instituted a public campaign financing program.

Instead of admitting the facts of life, politicians undermine the public trust with personal attacks that turn into ugly squabbles like the one reported by the Houston Chronicle last week. When the incumbent mayor filed a campaign report showing dozens of contributions from interested professionals, contractors, and developers, her principal challenger called her a "shake-down artist." I doubt she had to shake down a single contributor, and the challenger, a former city attorney, most likely knew this.

Here's the full quote: "The city of Houston is a victim of a mayor who is a shake-down artist. We have discovered astounding correlations between the mayor's award of city contracts in exchange for lucrative payments by contractors to her for her campaign."

An attorney knows that "correlations" are not proof of "exchange," and that mayors do not award city contracts. The great majority of them are awarded through a competitive bid process (the big exception is professional contracts), and the council approves contracts. The current city attorney says that the mayor is "consciously uninvolved in all forms of procurement to avoid political attack."

In other words, the mayoral challenger undermined the public trust by attacking the mayor for doing things she did not do and for things she did do, but which are legal and common nationwide. He proposed ethics reforms, but created a scandal relating to his opponent rather than recognizing an institutional problem that needs fixing, but has little or nothing to do with the current mayor.

Of course, once the mayor had been personally attacked, the mayor's campaign could not let the matter go or discuss solutions to the institutional problem. Instead, it came back with its own accusations, calling the mayoral challenger "the king of pay-to-play." A statement says that the former city attorney resigned "while under investigation for corruption involving city contracting practices. And within a week of leaving City Hall, he took a million-dollar job with a firm to which he had steered a lucrative city contract."

So what choice does the public have? It's a "shake-down artist" against "the king of pay-to-play." The candidates insist the story is one of individual corruption when it is really a story of institutional corruption, the story of legal conduct that creates an appearance that officials are being bribed with contributions and jobs.

The mayoral challenger's ethics reform proposals are good (but they are only piecemeal changes to a program that lacks some of the essential elements of a local government ethics program). The proposed changes include a two-year moratorium on accepting campaign contributions from municipal appointees and vendors, and on any city employees registering as lobbyists or working for lobbying firms; a $250 limit on contributions to candidates for city office from an officer, director or employee of a city contractor; a gift ban for mayoral candidates; and the creation of searchable online databases of city contracts and check registers.

But the proposals would be even better if the challenger would admit that what the mayor is doing is an unfortunate fact of life rather than an act of personal corruption.

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics

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