Trash Talk in Tulsa

A trash board member attends a homeowners association meeting to talk about potential changes to the city’s residential trash service. Also in attendance is a representative from the company that has the city's landfill contract. After the trash board member makes a short speech, she leaves the meeting and asks the company representative to answer questions from the audience. This was apparently not planned.

The city's trash collector, under a contract up for renewal and for which the landfill company plans to bid, asks the trash board member to withdraw from participation with respect to the trash collection contract, because she gave the appearance to the homeowners association that the landfill company was authorized to speak on behalf of the trash board and, therefore, that it would be collecting trash in the future.

This is what happened recently in Tulsa, according to an article in the Tulsa World this week. What appears to have been a happenstance encounter at a public meeting, and asking a vendor to answer questions within his knowledge, is turned by a competing vendor into an ethics issue.

The result so far is that the trash board member was passed over for the chairmanship of the board, which would otherwise have been hers, and the bid has been delayed pending an investigation by the mayor's office (even though the city does have an ethics advisory committee, which is intended to provide ethics advice).

The trash collector believes the trash board member violated these provisions of the ethics handbook:

“requires the highest standard of honesty, integrity, impartiality and conduct to gain and maintain the confidence of the public in city government.” and The ethics handbook also states that city officials shall avoid any action that might result in or create the appearance of “failing to use proper independence or impartiality in the performance of duties of office and employment.”

As in so many cases I've seen, in support of their desire to undermine the integrity of individuals they don't like, people point not to enforceable ethics provisions, but to aspirational provisions, even, in this case, words from an ethics handbook.

It's interesting that, according to the article, "the council has been eyeing the possibility of stripping the board of its contracting responsibilities and reducing it to an advisory body."

It's also interesting that last year, according to an article in yesterday's Tulsa World, the trash board member accused the then chair and others of "negotiating behind the scenes on dealings that should involve the entire membership and of cutting off discussions." In other words, she was already in the doghouse.

So what we have here is a minor incident turned into a major political football, involving the mayor (investigation), the council (an excuse for stripping the board of its powers), a board election, and a vendor trying to protect its contract by ridding the board of someone who, presumably, is not sympathethic to it.

The fact that not a single ethics provision appears to have been mentioned before starting a public investigation, and that the ethics advisory committee is being kept out of the matter, leads one to believe that this is not an ethics issue at all, but the use of ethics allegations for other purposes.

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics

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