Annapolis is an unusual little city in many ways. It may only have 40,000 residents, but it's the state capital, the county seat, the home of the U.S. Naval Academy, and equidistant, and not far, from Baltimore and Washington, D.C. With respect to government ethics, the county for which it is the county seat, Anne Arundel County, has a relatively good ethics program [1], complete with an executive director, which is very unusual even for a county of half a million people.

Therefore, it's not surprising that Annapolis's ethics commission and mayor are trying to improve the unusual little city's government ethics program. The most important improvements in the proposed ordinance [2] are (1) giving the EC more teeth (although they're very blunt teeth) and the right to initiate investigations, (2) giving the ethics program more transparency, (3) requiring more financial disclosure, and (4) placing stricter limits on gifts.

These are all important improvements. However, they are the usual piecemeal improvements. And although the impetus is not the usual scandal, it is another relatively usual cause:  a 2011 state requirement to have ethics provisions at least equivalent to the state model. Therefore, according to an article on the Eye on Annapolis website [3], the EC limited its review of ethics codes to the state model codes and the codes of similarly sized cities in the state. Sadly, no city in the state has a quality ethics program.

The result of this ethics reform, if it is accepted by the council, will be an ethics program that is still not independent of the mayor (he selects both the EC members and the city attorney, who acts as its counsel), that has no independent professional to provide timely ethics advice and ethics training, and that lacks an EC that can even penalize an official a penny. The language of the ethics code remains very legalistic and yet, in some places, vague.

However, it's not a bad code, and this is a sincere attempt to improve it. But it's too bad the city didn't think outside the box a little and, instead, consider giving the county ethics program jurisdiction over its officials. Since Annapolis is the county seat, this could lead other cities and towns in the county to join together in a professional, consolidated ethics program, which could itself be improved, so that it would be independent from all local officials and more transparent than it is now. For more on countywide programs, see the section on regional ethics programs [4] in my free e-book Local Government Ethics Programs.

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research, City Ethics

203-230-2548