City Officials Sue to Block Enforcement of Ethics Law

A group of Los Angeles officials and their family members filed a lawsuit on Wednesday seeking to prevent enforcement of the city’s new ethics law on grounds its financial disclosure requirements are excessive and invade their privacy.

At the same time, members of the city’s new Ethics Commission said they have discovered that the law’s enforcement provisions fail to cover any city employee below the rank of elected official, commission member or department head.

Members of the panel said they were also surprised to learn that the law does not cover the 1,200 city employees who do not belong to labor unions.

Among those excluded from ethics enforcement are a wide array of powerful City Hall figures. For instance, Deputy City Mayor Mark Fabiani, who runs day-to-day operations in the mayor’s office, and City Administrative Officer Keith Comrie, the top city executive, are exempt.

“I feel like the tiger looking in a mirror and realizing he has no teeth,” said Los Angeles Ethics Commission Director Benjamin Bycel, who was appointed in April to help the commission enforce the ethics law. “I’m hoping that the City Council will do the right thing and put teeth back in the commission’s mouth.”

Both the lawsuit and new questions about enforcement exemptions seem certain to create more difficulty and delay in implementing what was presented to voters a year ago as the nation’s toughest municipal ethics law. The law, approved amid allegations of malfeasance in the mayor’s office, was intended to avoid conflicts of interest in Los Angeles government by requiring city officials to disclose their personal finances in more detail than is mandated under state law.

While Proposition H passed handily, the measure only established an Ethics Commission and outlined broad goals; it was left for the City Council to adopt specific ordinances needed to enforce the law. Both the lawsuit and the ethics commissioners’ complaints of a gaping loophole deal not with the voter-approved measure but with the council’s enforcement ordinances.

Under those ordinances, certain city officials must for the first time report precise values of investments, property holdings and loans outside the city, and details of income earned by spouses and dependent children. Even improvements on personal property must be decribed.

But the Los Angeles Ethics Commission has been inundated with complaints from city managers, City Council members and other municipal employees that the ethics requirements are confusing at best.

On Wednesday, lawyer and City Library Commissioner Doug Ring took the debate to court, filing a 100-page lawsuit against the city in Superior Court on behalf of 12 plaintiffs, including himself.

The lawsuit argues that the law is onerous and impossible to understand, and it asks the Superior Court to immediately block its enforcement pending a fuller legal battle on the constitutional issues it raises.

“This law,” Ring said in an interview, “requires the plaintiffs to disclose enormous quantities of personal information that could potentially subject them to both civil and criminal penalties.

“Beyond that, the law is so badly written it is almost totally incomprehensible. So, we are asking the court to protect us from civil and criminal threats until the law is either rewritten or thrown out.”

Ring, a lobbyist for developers, is married to Cindy Miscikowsky, deputy to City Councilman Marvin Braude.

Other plaintiffs are Myrlie Evers, a former Board of Public Works member; Robert Gay, former chief deputy to the late City Councilman Gilbert Lindsay; Virginia Kruger, planning deputy to City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky; Anne Howell, a city planner; J. Michael Carey, a city clerk’s official; Shelley Smith, an assistant city attorney, and her husband; Marcia H. Kamine, a deputy city attorney, and her husband; Phyllis Winger, planning deputy to City Councilman Hal Bernson, and her husband and two children.

Some plaintiffs included relatives on the theory that they, too, are subject to scrutiny under the ordinances.

According to the lawsuit, the ethics law requires that city officials “must divulge to the public information describing their financial and personal affairs . . . in such detail as to compel them to forfeit their fundamental rights to privacy.”

They can choose not to comply and resign, it argues, “but in so doing, they are forced to forfeit their fundamental right to hold office.”

Mayor Tom Bradley declined to comment on the issue other than to say that “these questions are matters the Ethics Commission should resolve with the City Council.”

Ethics Commission Director Bycel said that, although “Doug Ring is asking legitimate good questions, the commission is making every attempt to answer those questions and we told him that.”

Bycel said the suit was premature, and problems with enactment of the ethics law are being addressed by the commission and council.

In that vein, the Ethics Commission has scheduled a special meeting on Friday to discuss what it called the “omission of penalty provisions” in the ethics ordinances adopted by the council last year.

“The city attorney’s office drafted the whole shebang,” said one city official who asked not to be identified. “They either made the omission on purpose or by accident.”

But Assistant City Atty. Anthony Alperin pointed out that his office merely followed council instructions in drafting the ethics ordinances.

Alperin said the exemptions stemmed from concerns by city union representations that the new rules might violate existing labor contracts and needed to be negotiated. As a result, the council chose to exempt all employees--union members or not--and apply the ethics measure only to elected officials, commissioners and departments heads.

Alperin said the exemptions should have come as no surprise to ethics commissioners or council members because they were spelled out in the ordinance.

Bradley proposed ethics reform after he came under fire for his own alleged ethical improprieties. A majority on the City Council, however, never wanted the ethics law in the first place.

City Hall insiders say the council loaded the legislation with enough restrictions on gifts, honorariums and contributions to make it unworkable.

Last year, voters approved the ethics law as part of a charter amendment giving City Council members and other elected officials a pay raise.