Problems with the Perfectly Ordinary

According to an article yesterday in the Seguin (TX) Gazette, there will be a perfectly ordinary local government ethics occurrence next Monday in Seguin, a town of 25,000 outside San Antonio: the city's ethics commission will meet in closed session to discuss a recently filed ethics complaint.

There doesn't seem to be anything wrong with this. But there are two serious problems here. One is that, according to the article, "the Ethics Commission generally meets only when an ethics complaint has been filed. The commission is required to hold an annual meeting in June to elect officers." Actually, the commission meets "when necessary to carry out its responsibilities." According to the city's website, the EC met only once each year from 2009 to 2012, all but once in June, to elect officers. In 2013, it doesn't appear to have met at all. In other words, the EC clearly does not have many responsibilities, and is not even being employed for the purpose of enforcement.

The second problem is that, according to the city attorney (who is both the city's ethics officer and the EC's counsel and staff), he cannot comment on the complaint because it doesn’t become public information until after it has been acted upon by the EC.

In short, the EC meets only to deal with complaints and, when it meets, it does so without transparency. In all other respects, the ethics program is run by the city attorney, even though he has a personal, professional, political, and/or superior-subordinate relationship with most of the individuals to whom he provides ethics advice. In other words, he is conflicted with respect to, and appears biased toward or against, these individuals, and yet is expected to do, and appear to be doing, what is best for the community.

This is what happens in small cities and counties across the country. Therefore, one might assume that it is a best practice, that thousands of cities and counties have agreed that, of all the ways they could set up an ethics program, this is the one that is best for their community.

Only this is not what has happened. Few of these local governments have considered a range of choices. And probably none of them has made, and then rejected, a list of the possible activities an EC may participate in, such as those in City Ethics' Checklist of Ethics Commission Activities.

Nor have many of these governments openly debated the appropriate role of the city or county attorney in an ethics program, and the advantages, for everyone involved, of having the EC select an ethics officer (a part-time contractor in small cities and counties) who has no relationship with those to whom she would provide ethics advice, who clearly represents the community's rather than officials' interests.

In local government ethics, what appears totally ordinary is simply what requires the least bother, the least cost, the least work from EC members, and the least ethics oversight by the community. In other words, what appears to be perfectly ordinary is actually an ethics program that has almost none of the elements of an effective ethics program.

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics

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