When a mayor replaces an entire ethics commission, it usually means
that he is taking over control of the city's ethics program, to protect himself and his allies. This
doesn't appear to be the case in Chicago, where today Mayor Emmanuel
replaced ethics board members whose terms had ended or were about to
end, and whose other members had been asked to resign, according to
an
article in today's Chicago Sun-Times .
There are two things that especially bother me about this wholesale
replacement of personnel, besides the fact that I don't think a
mayor should be involved in selecting EC members at all.
One is that the mayor's action appears to be all about enforcement,
and the media have picked up on this, portraying government ethics as
primarily about penalizing bad politicians. This is neither accurate
nor helpful to an ethics program. A government ethics program is more about prevention than it is
about enforcement. Training and advice are higher priorities than
investigating and penalizing.
The second thing that bothers me is the idea that lawyers, former
judges, former government insiders, social service leaders, and
clergy make the best EC members (see
their
bios ). There is no reason to believe that any one of these appointees will
not do a good job on the board. But I think it is better to have
members who have not been important players in local business,
government, and other fields where they have developed
relationships, or may to be seen to have relationships, with some of
the high-level officials who may come before them or seek their
advice. This is especially true when it is the mayor who has
appointed them, and it is members of the mayor's administration whom
they will be overseeing.
It's great that the mayor wants to make improving the ethics program
a priority of his administration. But this doesn't mean he has to put his personal mark on everything, especially with such a big splash (he even ignored the member recommendations of the Ethics Reform Task Force chair). If the board makes a
responsible decision to find the mayor (or one of his allies) not in
violation of the ethics code or gives him a favorable advisory
opinion, it will look like the mayor stacked the deck in his favor, no matter what his intention was.
It would have
made an even bigger splash if the mayor had heeded my recommendation
to have ethics board members selected not by him, but rather by
community organizations. This would have been a radical step, for
which he might have received more credit. But this would have meant allowing
an important aspect of the ethics program to be taken from his control.
As, I believe, it should be.
Robert Wechsler
Director of Research, City Ethics
203-230-2548
