Type the word "ethics" into the Birmingham, AL website [1] search box and nothing comes up. Nor can you find the city's ordinances. Mayor Larry Langford bills himself as a great reformer, but he certainly hasn't done anything to reform the city's ethics laws, or at least to let anyone know about them. In fact, according to the City Ethics site, the ethics ordinance and board used to be on the city website, but the links no longer work.

Langford's arrest today was not, however, for something that occurred in Birmingham, but rather in the county which contains it, Jefferson County, where according to an article in today's Birmingham News [2], Langford was head of the Dept. of Finance and General Services and president of the county commission. Ethics and ordinances don't seem to appear on the Jefferson County website, either.

The arrest of Langford ties in well with my recent blogs on gifts, because the arrest is based on $250,000 in gifts allegedly given him by two men, one of whom Langford allegedly required financial institutions to hire as a consultant with respect to sewer bonds. This sounds like small potatoes until you realize that this sewer bond fiasco has led Jefferson County to the edge of bankruptcy (see my March 2008 blog entry [3] about this mess for more information).

It doesn't seem as if the Jefferson County ethics program, if it existed, made it clear that gifts to county officials were not acceptable. The result was two years of federal investigations, during which Langford was elected mayor of Birmingham while Jefferson County went down the tubes. Investigations into bribery take a very long time because so much must be proven in order to make the case that even enormous gifts were given in return for actions or inaction.

Dealing with gifts through an ethics program with a code provision, training, and enforcement is a far more efficient and inexpensive way of handling (and possibly even preventing) this sort of problem than waiting two years seeking an indictment. Many of the allegations have been public for some time.

But would a provision prohibiting gifts from people doing business with the county have applied to gifts from someone a department head or county executive required people doing business with the county to hire? This is a perfect way to get around such prohibitions, even though this was not apparently necessary. It will cause me to see if I can improve the Model Code language to cover gifts from those who benefit directly or indirectly from city contracts.

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research, City Ethics

203-230-2548