No Thanks to the City Council : Zelman takes a walk and Ethics Commission goes back to drawing board

The dramatic decision of Walter Zelman, longtime head of California Common Cause, not to accept a recently created job as the city’s top ethics official illustrates just how much ethical trouble this city is in--and how politically difficult the much-needed work of the new Ethics Commission will be.

The issue is not the disparity between the $90,000 Zelman was offered by the five-member Ethics Commission, acting within a previously approved salary range, and the $76,254 that the City Council finally decided to offer. The issue is the eyebrow-raising and thoroughly unseemly intervention of council politicians in what was properly Ethics Commission business.

Keep in mind that this is not just another city agency that must be directly accountable to the City Council. The Ethics Commission was designed to be a special case--to be independent, off to the side and certainly in no way subservient to one of the political bodies on whose actions the commission may someday have to pass judgment.

It is no wonder that, when the council reduced his salary offer, Zelman took a walk. He had been operating under the reasonable assumption that the people of Los Angeles were his bosses--not the City Council. After all, the people had passed June’s Charter Amendment H by a margin that surprised many long-term political observers. Obviously, voters were sending a clear and unmistakable signal that they wanted an independent Ethics Commission to help improve the city’s polluted political climate.

But last week the City Council sent its own unmistakable message: It would still try to pull strings and show the commission who was boss.

What was almost as awful was the council’s transparent justification of its deal-breaking salary intervention. It said it was a cost-control measure. Not many Angelenos are going to buy that. We’re all too familiar with the way the council spends money, whether on worthless trips or questionable projects.

Pity, now, the poor ethics commissioners--serving without pay, trying to perform a potentially vital public service and forced back to the drawing board to search for a new executive director.

Who will they now persuade to step into the lion’s den? Who will want to serve under circumstances of possibly diminished independence? Perhaps the commission will be able to come up with another good choice. But if it does, it will be no thanks to the council.