The Lonely Outsiders of City Hall

The disdain felt in City Hall toward the city Ethics Commission is reflected by the shabbiness of the fledgling agency’s offices.

The commission is tucked away on the 12th floor of City Hall East, far in the back of a section of the city administrative office. The commission shares a receptionist with the office staff. Sometimes, nobody answers the phone.

Executive Director Benjamin Bycel’s office is far down the hall. He works behind a badly scratched desk that looks like it’s left over from the Yorty Administration. Rugs are worn. The paint is dirty. Short of filing cabinets, Bycel stores records in boxes along the wall. A key aide is two long hallways from his office. The rest of his staff is scattered around the 12th floor.

This is just one of the ways that City Hall deals with unwelcome outsiders.

In City Hall, you get along if you go along. Even villainous influence peddlers are greeted as dear friends by our leaders as long as they respect the City Hall way of doing things. But if an outside force--especially one with the Ethics Commission’s mandate for reform--disturbs the clubby atmosphere, there is no limit to the intensity and sneakiness of the assault upon the intruder.

That was quite a surprise to Bycel, a 48-year-old attorney and law school dean who came here from the sheltered enclave of Santa Barbara with the naive idea that he and the City Hall crew would march together down the ethical path.

Not even two years as an ACLU lobbyist in Sacramento had prepared Bycel for what awaited him. “I think we are an unwelcome force in City Hall,” Bycel said Monday, after more than a month on the job. “The applause meter is very low because, as one department head said to me, ‘All you can do is bring grief to people.’ ”

From the start, the Ethics Commission was regarded as an intrusion on a comfortable way of doing business.

Most of the council didn’t want the ethics law. Mayor Tom Bradley came up with ethics reform when he was under fire for his own alleged ethical failures. He appointed a bunch of reformers of the most aggressive style to study campaign finance and conflict of interest. They proposed a charter amendment restricting campaign contributions, gifts and honorariums, and instituting public financing of campaigns.

Rather than kill the proposal, the council tried an old legislative tactic. They loved it to death, adding so many restrictions on gifts, honorariums and contributions as to make the law unworkable. The only simple language in the law gave a pay raise to the council members and other elected officials. Council members wanted no confusion about that provision.

Last year, voters approved the charter amendment. Afterward, a five-member city Ethics Commission was appointed to enforce the law.

The council, showing who’s boss, rejected the commission’s choice for executive director, Walter Zelman, on the grounds that he wanted too high a salary. The commission took that with a smile and hired Bycel, who was accepted by the council after a session rich with pledges of affection and support.

The current phase of the attack seems to be in the hands of City Atty. Jim Hahn, who is a loyal member of the City Hall Establishment. You don’t see a head-on assault from Hahn. No headlines. Rather, Hahn is working through his ace elections specialist, Assistant City Atty. Anthony Alperin, who is acting as the commission’s attorney.

Alperin loves to sort through legal complexity, massaging language, considering interpretations, doing it all in a leisurely fashion. Not surprisingly, the Ethics Commission is under fire for being too slow. Alperin is also interpreting the law in a way that looks suspiciously as though he--like the council--is trying to love it to death by making it too strict.

Gary Mattlingly, general manager of the pension department, got an example of that when he sent a somewhat bewildered request for advice to the commission.

He had asked Alperin’s office if his employees could accept refreshments at investment industry seminars without violating the law’s prohibition against accepting gifts. The city attorney, in an opinion from Alperin’s office, “advised me that while he might overlook a cup of coffee, a croissant was clearly prohibited. So I have not allowed staff attendance at such functions this year.”

Everyone is telling Bycel and the five ethics commissioners to relax, to go along and get along. As one veteran told me, “Ben drinks too much coffee. He’s too impatient.”

Bycel, surrounded by packing cartons, his staff scattered, is trying. “Everyone tells me that it’s a family and you have to deal with it as a family,” he said. “But it’s a dysfunctional family.”