Many local legislative bodies have ethics committees, even where there is an ethics commission. The reason for these self-regulatory committees is that these bodies have their own codes of conduct that go beyond conflicts of interest, and which are enforced, discussed, and amended separate from the city or county's ethics program. Some local ethics programs consist of nothing more than a council ethics committee and code of conduct, but that situation is not the topic of this blog post.

Council ethics committees can be confusing. For example, this week Philadelphia magazine ran an article [1] with the headline, "City Council Has an Ethics Committee! (But It Never, Ever Meets). Long live corrupt and contented Philadelphia." The ethics committee has apparently not met for 20 years, even though, according to the article, nine council members have been convicted over the past 32 years.

What's an ethics committee to do? It can't just slink away. As the article says, "that would lead to the headline 'City Council Disbands Committee on Ethics,' which would let the public know that a committee on ethics once existed, that it never, ever met, and that ethics were so unimportant to City Council that it disbanded the committee supposedly dedicated to policing ethics. That's not a headline City Council wants."

There are a lot of things for a council ethics committee to do. It could hold discussions of ethics problems that arise, even when there is no complaint. It could consider changes to the council code of conduct. In fact, it could schedule an annual meeting to discuss such changes. It could discuss the city's ethics program, perhaps after the ethics board files its annual report. It could hold an annual training session. It could award employees who have done admirably ethical work.

In short, there is no excuse for such a committee to be dormant. Its dormancy doesn't say that council members are either corrupt or so ethical that it has no need to consider ethics issues. What it says is that the council doesn't consider ethics issues to have a high priority, and is concerned that any meeting on ethics will focus on member misconduct, problems with the ethics program that the council may not want to fix, the council's failure to provide ethical leadership, its members' lack of understanding of ethical issues, etc. In short, not meeting shows a lack of interest, understanding, and courage. Most of all, it shows a lack of professionalism, and a failure to understand that a professional approach to ethics is even a possibility.

Better that a legislative body see ethics committee meetings as an opportunity to gain more understanding of ethical issues and to show its interest in improving the ethics program. Even if they don't really care, they should at least recognize that such discussions send an important message to everyone in the government that they should be considering the ethical aspects of matters and doing their best not to engage in conduct that will lead to scandals that undermine trust in the government.

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research, City Ethics

203-230-2548