Good Ethics Makes Good Politics

There may not be any second acts in American lives, but occasionally you do get one in politics. Tuesday morning, for instance, the curtain will go up on a new installment in a drama called the City of Los Angeles Ethics Act. That’s when the City Council will reconsider its sorry vote of a few weeks ago to strip the proposal of its public- financing provisions and gut much of what remained.

The conflict in this dramatic episode is between the public interest--in the form of enforceable new ethics laws, affordable public financing of campaigns and reasonable pay for city officials--and the council majority’s self-interest, which reflexively resists reform. In the first act, to put the matter bluntly, self-interest triumphed. Now, the best way to restore the public’s battered confidence in the basic integrity of its local government is to have the council itself set Los Angeles’ ethical house in order.

The council will have a chance on Tuesday to reconsider measures that will do just that: The first two--the proposals for clear new conflict-of-interest and disclosure statutes enforced by an independent ethics commission, and for partial public financing of campaigns--originated with a committee of distinguished private citizens appointed by Mayor Tom Bradley. The third--the proposal to increase council members’ pay from $61,522 to $80,000 by linking it to the salaries of municipal judges--originated with the lawmakers themselves. In the original form, all three are meritorious. How the council now chooses to combine these proposals in the charter amendments that must be placed before the voters should not be decisive for anyone with a serious interest in equitable, effective city government.

The city of Los Angeles needs clear, commonsensical ethics, financial disclosure and conflict-of-interest laws, and an independent body to enforce them, as the citizens’ commission originally proposed them. It needs what cities like New York and Seattle already have: affordable public campaign finance, which will reduce the pressure on elected officials to accommodate themselves to special interests. It needs to pay its public officials a salary at least roughly commensurate with their arduous responsibilities. It needs to secure these things not only for its own sake but also because cities throughout California are looking to the state’s largest city for leadership on these issues.

None of these steps will create a political Eden from which the serpent of corruption is forever banished. There is, after all, no perfection this side of the grave. But enactment of the commission’s initial proposals on ethics and public finance, along with equitable pay for public officials, will go a long way toward reassuring reasonable people that their city government is honestly doing the best it can.