Yet Another Underhanded Attempt to Water Down the Broward County Ethics Commission's New Ethics Code

Update: August 9, 2010 (see below)

You've got to hand it to them:  Broward County (FL) commissioners don't give up. Some of them have fought and fought against the prospect of having a new ethics code, written by the county ethics commission. August 10 is the deadline by which they must either approve the new ethics code, or it will appear on the November ballot.

After the county attorney's attempt in June to declare parts of the code unconstitutional or beyond the EC's authority led to a backlash against the idea of undermining the code, and then an independent lawyer's memo taking the same position also failed, there was only one possible way to stop the inevitable:  water down the code with a so-called "glitch ordinance."

But wait. The drafters of the code were smart enough to put in a clause that would prevent the code from being watered down by the very people it was intended to regulate. Here's the clause:

The Board of County Commissioners may at any time strengthen or supplement the restrictions and protections provided under this Code, but the restrictions and  protections hereof may be weakened or removed, in whole or in part, only by citizen initiative as referenced in Section 7.01 of the Broward County Charter.

That seems pretty ironclad. Which is why the glitch ordinance (p. 7) strikes this clause as well as weakens the code.

Voting against the code and letting voters decide would be a perfectly acceptable thing to do. But voting for the code and at the same time castrating it — well, it's not going to happen, even in Broward County. I can't see why it was even proposed. Did anyone really believe they'd get away with it?

The weakening is just a followup to the failed constitutionality and authority arguments, affecting the same provisions, the prohibitions on commissioners lobbying local governments in the county and the jurisdiction over commissioners' family members. As I said, these people don't give up.

Also see the scratched-up version of the ethics code that will be voted on by the commissioners on August 10. These changes are beneficial, as far as I could tell.

Thanks to ethics commissioner Bob Wolfe for alerting me to what was happening.

Update: August 9, 2010
For the sake of entertainment, here is how Fred Grimm began his Miami Herald column this weekend: "You've got to appreciate the brazen hand behind this latest attempt to eviscerate ethics reform in Broward County. Same way you watch, with perverse fascination, horror movie villains creeping back from oblivion to wreak more mayhem."

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics

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