Ethics Rules Without Absurdities : The City Council should enact sensible financial-disclosure requirements

One of the key components of Charter Amendment H, the ethics reform package approved by voters in June, 1990, was a tough financial disclosure requirement for elected officials, city commissioners and government employees. But for more than a year, political and legal wrangling has straitjacketed the law and prevented the Los Angeles Ethics Commission from properly enforcing it.

New disclosure amendments--drafted in a cooperative effort by the city attorney, the Ethics Commission and other city officials--are to be put before the City Council. The purpose of the new legislation is to eliminate constitutional challenges to the ethics law while maintaining the fundamental goal and spirit of the original provisions: full and complete disclosure by elected, appointed and other key city officials.

The law better defines disclosure requirements by clarifying the relationship between an employee’s job and outside interests. It requires disclosure “where there is some nexus between the interest required to be disclosed and the duty and responsibilities of the city official” in question.

For example, if an employee of the Department of Sanitation decides to invest in a restaurant franchise in the city, that employee must disclose the seller’s name, the purchase price and the site. If the employee sells the investment, he or she must reveal the name of the investment, the sale price to the nearest $1,000 and the name of the buyer.

The council should quickly approve this ordinance. In large measure, the council is responsible for the gridlock in ethics enforcement because it drafted disclosure amendments that turned out to be too vague or too complex.

Voters never have cared if a city official took a free cup of coffee. But they do care if a lobbyist is in a cozy real estate deal with an official who’s supposed to be doing the people’s business. With the new revisions, the Ethics Commission will finally be able to focus on the job that the voters created it for in the first place: to oversee and enforce laws designed to keep city officials free of conflict of interest and therefore to maintain the integrity of the political process.