The Good and Bad of Palm Beach County's EC Selection Process

The independent selection of EC members is a great thing for making a government ethics program appear independent of those under its jurisdiction and for ensuring that an ethics commission remains fully stocked with members. But how this selection process is actually accomplished matters, too.

There is good and bad in the Palm Beach County (FL) ethics commission selection process, as can be seen from recent events, as chronicled in a Sun-Sentinel article.

The Good
The good is how swiftly the selection process has worked. A different organization selects each seat on the ethics commission. When the member selected by the association of chiefs of police resigned, the seat was quickly filled.  When the term of the member selected by the president of Florida Atlantic University ended, the seat was quickly filled. And, according to another Sun-Sentinel article, six weeks after another member died in office, the Palm Beach County League of Cities selected someone to fill her seat.

The norm in other cities is for seats to remain open for months, sometimes for years. Mayors and council members do not appear to put a high priority on filling EC seats. Often, there are simply too many board and commission seats to fill, but often it is not in their interest to make it easy for an EC to function. With multiple open seats, ECs find it hard to get a quorum to do business. That suits many high-level officials just fine.

The Bad
There are two bad aspects to the Palm Beach County EC selection process. One is that the organizations tend to select their own members or former members. The police chiefs selected a former police chief. The League of Cities selected a former mayor. And Florida Atlantic University selected a professor. The professor is much less problematic than former high-level officials, who may be seen as favoring officials who come before them.

Organizations given the authority to select EC members should be told that they should not necessarily pick their own, especially if they have held high public office, such as police chiefs and mayors. It is important that EC members be seen as unbiased, and no one will consider a former mayor or police chief unbiased toward other high-level officials.

The second problem with the selection process is allowing such organizations to participate in the first place. Clearly, they do not sufficiently appreciate conflicts of interest issues to select people who will appear to be unbiased and who are unlikely to have personal or political relationships with those who come before them. Such organizations should be replaced by other organizations whose members and former members do not tend to have these relationships or that will agree not to select such individuals.

In addition, the League of Cities has been active in trying to undermine the Palm Beach County ethics program (see my blog post on this). Any organization whose parent organization lobbies against an ethics program and whose membership consists of those under the ethics program's jurisdiction should not be permitted to select EC members.

On the whole, good government organizations, non-governmental professional associations, and nonpolitical civic groups make much better participants in an independent EC selection process.

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics

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