Fort Wayne Deserves a Far Better Ethics Program

If you're a city of a quarter million people with an ethics board that “has not met in many years and ... is effectively non-existent,” according to a council member who has proposed a new ethics ordinance, what do you do?

Not, I think, what the proposed ordinance (p. 16ff) does, which is create a new ethics board solely for council members, and consisting of two council members, the city attorney, and two citizens of their choice.

The current ethics system is based on a 2001 executive order made by a former mayor. According to an article in Monday's Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, the current mayor had not even filed his financial disclosure form this year, until alerted by the newspaper (an alert from the city attorney's office, saying forms were due March 19, did not work, even though failure to file is a Class D felony (which is itself ridiculous)). There's not an ethics page on the city website, and only one indirect link to the executive order.

In short, the system is not functioning, it wasn't very good on paper to begin with, and the government's leaders seem not to be very interested in having an effective, all-encompassing ethics program.

The council member's principal issue is a good one:  recusal. Currently, state criminal law requires council members to disclose conflicts, but not to recuse themselves. The proposed ordinance requires recusal.

But the proposed ordinance is very limited. There is only one, very limited gift provision, and the conflict provision is limited in how it applies to business associates and others. There are no representation or revolving door provisions, nor several others. And the language is sometimes weak. For example, council members cannot "require" council employees to be involved in political activity, but they can ask all they want.

The council should come up with a comprehensive ethics program that includes all the principal ethics provisions, a truly independent ethics commission, an ethics officer, ethics training, all three sorts of disclosure, lobbying provisions, and whistleblower protection. A city the size of Fort Wayne should have no less.

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics

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