A City Commissioner's Criminal Circus, and The Choice Confronting Her

I wish that a grad student somewhere would decide to do an exhaustive study of a poor ethics environment. Broward County, Florida would not be a bad choice as the subject of her research.

According to an article in the Miami Herald this week, a Deerfield Beach commissioner, formerly mayor and formerly a Broward County commissioner, is the 17th official in this southern Florida county to be indicted on ethics charges in the last five years. Only last month, I wrote about the 16th, the mayor of Tamarac, a city with its own rotten crop of oranges.

A Criminal Circus
Considering that a local gadfly-blogger named Chaz Stevens filed a complaint against the Deerfield Beach commissioner in June 2009 and has been going after her ever since, it must have taken a great effort to bring charges against the other sixteen officials in the county. There must be many more officials whose antagonists have not yet been successful.

But more to the point, the difficulty of bringing charges points to two problems. One is that other officials are doing little or nothing to create a good ethics environment. Loyalty is apparently more important than ethics.

Two is the very fact that the commissioner was criminally indicted. It's difficult, expensive, and excessive to have an official indicted on charges of not disclosing a conflict, so that she is forced to surrender herself at the county jail, and have an ethics matter turned into a circus.

And in Florida the circus has a ringmaster, the governor. This time, the ringmaster threw the act out of the tent, that is, he suspended the commissioner from office.

What this does is heighten the loyalty (who wants to turn another official into a criminal), heighten the feelings of discrimination (the commissioner is African-American, the governor white), and heighten the partisan tensions (the commissioner is a Democrat, the governor a Republican). How is this going to increase the public's trust in local government?

A History of Questionable Behavior
A column by Fred Grimm in Saturday's Herald sets out the long history of the commissioner's ethics problems, which at one point were enough to prevent her re-election to county office. It's a sad story that is, sadly, not nearly atypical enough. It started with the use of city stationery for personal business purposes, and moved on to unauthorized junkets, a phantom campaign worker, an undisclosed conflict that might have led to criminal charges had a Herald reporter not forced disclosure, approval of an overpriced land purchase, and involvement with free tickets and missing funds at local festivals.

And then the commissioner apparently turned a local business association into a family affair. First, she worked for it and arranged for a sizeable loan to the association from her brother. Now her daughter is the association's president. The commissioner allegedly did not disclose these conflicts and voted on matters involving the association, including a grant that would have helped pay back her brother.

She doesn't seem to be a criminal. But she does seem to be an individual who does not separate the personal from the public. She seems to be a popular community leader and, at least at the local as opposed to county level, what she has done hasn't hurt her reputation. The indictment probably came as a big shock.

Commissioner's Choice
Her attorney says she's going to fight the charges. Assuming the truth of her relationship with the business association, she shouldn't. If she really wants to be a good community leader and leave a lasting impression on the community, beyond all she's done for it as an official and otherwise, she should use this occasion as a chance to tell her community the whole story about her personal use of her public office, and use that story to help change the way officials handle the relationship between their public role and their personal and business roles.

Or she can cost the community many thousands of dollars trying to clear a name that will get murkier and murkier as the news media rake through the history of her misconduct.

This is the moment when she has to decide whether to cap her long public service with a grand gesture or a tough fight.

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics

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