2011 City Council Ethics Agenda
The Committee of Seventy’s
2011 ETHICS AGENDA
PHILADELPHIA CITY COUNCIL
The Committee of Seventy is asking you and the other declared candidates for Philadelphia City Council to commit to the attached Ethics Agenda – which is directed towards continuing to improve the political culture in Philadelphia.
Seventy would be surprised if you agreed with all of its recommendations. We urge you to embrace the ones you favor, explain your reasoning behind any you oppose and offer additional ideas we haven’t thought of.
In 2007, Seventy distributed an “Ethics Agenda” to the mayoral and City Council candidates. This “Ethics Agenda" spurred the creation of a Task Force on Ethics and Campaign Finance Reform, whose Final Report contained many of Seventy’s proposed reforms. Some ethics reforms achieved by City Council include:
• Passing the city’s first-ever lobbying registration and disclosure law.
• Improving certain provisions of the city’s campaign finance ordinance.
• Working more cooperatively with the Philadelphia Board of Ethics.
At the same time, there is a significant amount of “unfinished business, “most notably:
• Enacting permanent rules that apply across the government, including forbidding nepotism, tightening policies on accepting gifts and imposing greater restrictions on outside employment.
• Passing a comprehensive whistleblower law.
• Adopting additional campaign finance reforms.
The next Council has an opportunity to strengthen Philadelphia’s legal and policy framework to reach the highest level of ethical standards.
As you embark upon your campaign, we ask that you state your position on 24 specific reform measures that are designed to make Council as an institution, its members, and City government overall more accountable, transparent and effective.
Again, we invite you to share your own ideas for improving ethics in Philadelphia government. Your responses, and those of your opponents, will be published on the Committee of Seventy’s website (www.seventy.org).
Please state your agreement, or explain your disagreement, with the following reforms:
Recent rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court have raised concerns about the floodgates for unlimited campaign dollars flowing into Philadelphia. The first test of the 2007 city campaign finance ordinance was overwhelmingly successful and helped cripple “pay-to-play” here.
1. I will oppose any bill that seeks to dismantle or weaken the city’s campaign finance ordinance, including changing existing contribution limits.
2. I will support legislation to require corporations or unions that spend their general funds to support or oppose Philadelphia candidates to disclose their identity and amount of spending to the Philadelphia Board of Ethics, and to require the Board to make this information publicly available online.
3. I will support strengthening the city’s campaign finance ordinance to require 527 committees – groups that are only permitted to advocate either on behalf of or in opposition to political issues, and not for the election or defeat of a particular candidate – to register as political committees.
Although improvements in the city’s finance ordinance were made to reflect lessons learned in the 2007 municipal elections, other proposed reforms – such as tying the receipt of campaign dollars to an election cycle rather than to a calendar year – remain unaddressed.
4. I will support holding a City Council hearing after the 2011 elections to consider additional reforms of the campaign finance ordinance with an eye towards making the city’s law a national model for diminishing pay-to-play.
Although the city maintains an online database of political contributions, it is difficult to search and to understand.
5. I will support providing city funds to improve the city’s electronic campaign finance report database so that it can be easily searched and understood by the public and its data can be exportable into a spreadsheet or other analytic software formats.
6. I will support making it easy for the public to learn about the contributions made by recipients of non-competitively bid contracts to elected city officials by linking eContract Philly (the listing of firms and companies seeking or receiving non-competitively bid contract awards) with the campaign finance report database.
City Council holds public hearings on proposed spending by virtually every taxpayer-funded unit of city government, including the Mayor’s office, City departments, commissions, boards and agencies, the independently elected row offices and the School District of Philadelphia. The only part of government for which the budget is not open for public comment is City Council.
7. I will support holding a public hearing on City Council’s annual proposed budget, and the budgets of individual Council members.
8. I will support making details of Council’s proposed budget available online, in the same format and in the same detail as other city departments.
9. I will support a public comment period at the end of every daily budget hearing session – rather than at the end of the budget hearings – so that citizens can ask questions about proposed spending by all tax-payer funded units of city government.
Many city employees hold second jobs. However, since information on outside employment is not online for most employees, it is hard to determine any potential conflicts of interest with the employee’s city job.
10 I will support requiring all elected and appointed city employees to register their outside jobs, and a detailed job description, with the Philadelphia Board of Ethics on an annual basis and to update that information during the year, as needed. This information should be publicly available online.
Philadelphia’s independently elected row offices operate with little oversight. The City Controller has accused the Sheriff’s office of severe financial mismanagement. The office in charge of city elections – the City Commissioners – was tarnished when its Deputy Commissioner (the daughter of the Commissioners’ Chair) was found by the Philadelphia Board of Ethics to have engaged in illegal work related to elections.
11. I will support asking the voters to approve a proposed amendment to the city Charter to eliminate two independently elected row offices – City Commissioners and Sheriff – and to transfer their necessary functions to other parts of government in order to ensure greater accountability.
City-related authorities, some on which City Council members serve as Board members, operate by different ethical rules and practices than the rest of city government – or one another. Three examples include the Philadelphia Authority for Industrial Development, Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority and, until recently, the Philadelphia Housing Authority.
12. I will support implementing consistent ethical rules and practices to be binding on all city-related authorities.
Public officials sometimes hire or appoint members of their immediate family to work directly for them or recommend members of their immediate family for other paid or appointed positions in city government.
13. I will support the enactment of permanent legislation that forbids any city official or employee from having a role in hiring or promoting or participating in other personnel decisions involving a member of their immediate family (spouse, domestic partner, parent, sibling or child) either by the city official or employee or by others in city government.
14. I will not personally hire or appoint a member of my immediate family or recommend the hiring or appointment of a member of my immediate family by any other person, department, board, commission, agency or authority of city government.
An amendment to the City Charter proposed in Council last year would have overturned 60 year old rules prohibiting most of the city’s workforce from engaging in political activity. The rules are still intact, although they do not apply to City Council’s staff.
15. I will oppose amending the City Charter to allow city workers to serve as ward leaders, committeepeople or from taking part in the management or affairs of a political party or in a political campaign.
16. I will support reversing the current exemption of City Council staff from existing city rules that ban city workers from serving as ward leaders, committeepeople or from taking an active part in the management or affairs of a political party or in a political campaign.
17. I will not personally hire a ward leader, committeeperson to serve on my staff or allow my staff members to take an active part in the management or affairs of a political party or in a political campaign, including my future campaigns.
Philadelphia has several laws that protect city employees from retaliation for making credible reports of abuses and waste in government – but they only apply in certain circumstances.
18. I will support passage of a comprehensive whistleblower law that provides sufficient protections for city employees who make good faith complaints about perceived wrongdoing in government.
The City Charter requirement that all City Council meetings be open and accessible to the public at all times has often been sidestepped, with important deliberations effectively happening behind closed doors or meetings scheduled at times when most members of the public are unable to attend.
19. I will support promoting greater public access to, and participation in, meetings and hearings convened by City Council and its committees – including holding more sessions during evening hours and in locations throughout the city.
Annual disclosure statements that City Council members are required to file with the state and city are open to the public – but the public has to go to the Records Department in City Hall to see the city forms.
20. I will support legislation that requires all annual city financial disclosure statements to be publicly available online.
21. I will support making additional information about City Council and its staff publicly available on Council’s website, including names, positions, salaries, membership on boards and commissions inside or outside government, and positions held in any political party and/or political organization.
The independent Board of Ethics received a strong mandate from the citizens of Philadelphia to regulate the ethical conduct of city government.
22. I will support sufficient funding for the Board of Ethics to operate effectively, including, but not limited to, the resources necessary to carry out its oversight of the city’s new lobbying law.
An executive order places strict limitations on the solicitation or acceptance of gifts, gratuities and favors by officials in the executive and administrative branches of government.
23. I will support strengthening the current rules on the acceptance of gifts by enacting permanent and clear guidelines applicable to the entire city workforce that would allow gifts up to an explicit dollar value, with limited exceptions.
An office of the Inspector General is currently part of the executive branch and has no authority to investigate wrongdoing by other elected officials.
24. I will support the creation within the City Charter of an independent Inspector General with authority to investigate corruption, fraud, waste or dishonest practices throughout city government, including City Council.
If you would like to supplement your responses to the questions above with any additional ideas or statements, please feel free to provide further comments below.
Click here to get a PDF of this Ethics Agenda