Law Was a Model Until the Council Chewed It to Bits : Ethics: It was sometimes hard to tell whether damage was intentional. Now things can be made right.

Last Thursday, Superior Court Judge Ronald Sohigian ruled that certain parts of Los Angeles’ ethics law may be unconstitutional. Although there is a chance that he will reverse the ruling, or be reversed on appeal, his decision should lead the City Council to rewrite important sections of the law. Hopefully, the council will adopt proposals offered two years ago by a commission that I chaired.

That panel, the Commission to Draft an Ethics Code for Los Angeles City Government, released a report in November, 1989, that outlined an ethics package with 30 major provisions. Our proposals, based on six months of extensive research and a dozen public hearings, were widely praised. “It is already being cited as a model for the nation,” The Times said in an editorial, “and rightly so.”

For the next two months, the commission worked with a Councilman Michael Woo to turn the recommendations into mutually acceptable statutory language. Though there were marginal changes, none represented a material departure from our original report. But when the law reached the floor of the City Council, it was chewed to bits.

During several weeks of highly charged and widely publicized debates, the council added more than 100 amendments. Were they designed to improve the law--or to destroy it? It was sometimes hard to tell. The commission and several council members tried to resist many of the changes, but our efforts were often fruitless.

The most widely publicized amendment added a pay raise for council members. But other alterations were almost as important. The council, for example, reduced the independence of the Ethics Commission. We wanted it to be a free-standing body with ensured funding, based on the model of the California Fair Political Practices Commission. But the council insisted on retaining the power to approve new rules and regulations and to appropriate the Ethics Commission’s budget. The commission is, therefore, ultimately controlled by the very officials it must regulate.

Some of the most troubling changes involved a rewrite of the sections dealing with financial disclosure and gifts. We warned that those changes were bad public policy. Now, at least for the moment, they have been declared unconstitutional.

To be more specific:

Financial disclosure: The commission I chaired proposed extensive financial disclosure by the city’s 18 elected officials and a handful of “top full-time decision makers.” We defined “top full-time decision-makers” as “those men and women whose influence and power is pervasive, such as the deputy mayor and the chief administrative officer.”

In a major amendment to our proposals, the City Council decided to extend full reporting requirements to thousands of lower-level employees and to part-time commissioners. For example, a member of the Animal Control Board was required to disclose as much financial information as a council member. The council’s action may have been designed in a spirit of reform, or it may have been a manifestation of the old axiom that misery loves company. In either case, as we noted, there was a serious risk that it would be held unconstitutional as an unwarranted and unnecessary invasion of the privacy of people with relatively limited power.

Gifts: We tried to put a tight limit on gifts without unnecessarily obstructing the normal human interchange between relatives or close friends. For example, we would have allowed gifts of nominal value, aggregating less than $50 from a single source during a calendar year. As we explained in our report, “the commission considered adopting a slightly tougher law which would have prohibited gifts from anyone, including friends and family members, who is doing or seeking government business. So far as we know, no jurisdiction has such a tough law, nor did it seem necessary to restrict the private relationships of people who are close friends or relatives.”

After an intense debate, the council decided to ban all gifts from people doing or seeking business with the city, but to allow gifts of any size from everyone else. Some hardened observers thought that some council members were motivated by a desire to continue receiving very expensive gifts from people who are not close friends or relatives and do not do business with the city. Whatever the motive, the new law was, as we predicted, impractical, particularly when it was narrowly interpreted by the city attorney. City officials were told that they had to refuse a cup of coffee when holding a meeting in the office of someone doing business with the city.

Fortunately, many important parts of our ethics package were adopted by the City Council, approved by 57% of the electorate and remain in effect even after the judge’s ruling. Elected officeholders are prohibited from earning any outside income or honorariums; there are tough new limits on campaign contributions and on spending by political candidates who wish to accept limited public financing; whistle-blowers are protected and encouraged to come forward with information about government misconduct, and Los Angeles has a strong new Ethics Commission with the power to offer advisory rulings, conduct investigations, levy fines and even to appoint a special prosecutor to act in important cases. What’s more, all of these provisions can be enforced by private citizens, through the courts, if the Ethics Commission fails to act.

Now the City Council can make the law even better. It is time to clean up those provisions that were badly mangled as they made their way through the political process. Indeed, the council can do so by adopting amendments that were recently sent to them by the Ethics Commission after months of hearings. Then we will truly be able to point to our ethics law as a model for the nation.