IRVINE : Council Adopts Ethics Code, ‘Whistle-Blower’ Protection

The city has adopted its first formal code of ethics and “whistle-blower” resolution.

City Council members said that Orange County’s troubled economic times underscore their belief that the time is right to institutionalize ethical behavior.

The new code, which governs everything from the private use of telephones by city employees to acceptance of gifts from members of the public, is based on a 1990 memorandum on ethics created by City Manager Paul O. Brady Jr.

“Mr. Brady already had guidelines for his staff people, which were very good,” said Lowell Johnson, an aerospace worker on the five-member citizens’ committee that helped shape the new ethics code. “We had some good debates on what ethics really is. It was tough.”

Councilman Greg Smith was first to suggest that the city create a formal code of ethics, citing concerns raised by members of the city’s Safe Community Task Force.

“One of the points that came out of that task force was that there is a real crisis in ethics,” Smith said. “Not only in the community, but throughout the country.”

The new ethics code tells employees that “high ethical standards” are more important than loyalty to co-workers or department heads.

The code was accompanied by a resolution affirming state law that protects employees from retaliation for reporting wrongdoing.

The whistle-blower resolution was prompted by Mark Petracca, a UC Irvine social science professor who says it did not go far enough.

“It’s good, but it’s not good enough,” Petracca said. “What I was looking for was a proactive apparatus that would actively encourage people as a matter of course to be whistle-blowers.”

With such a policy in place, Petracca said, some city employees might have been encouraged to question the city’s decision to borrow additional money to invest in the county portfolio.

“What incentive would anybody in the city have had to raise a question about whether or not that was proper?” Petracca said. “No one would have had that incentive.”

But Petracca applauds the city’s new ethics code, which addresses what he believes is a national concern about the behavior of officials at all levels in government agencies.

Gene Bedley, an Irvine elementary school principal and member of the citizens’ committee that formed the new code of ethics, said people are struggling to create a standard for ethical behavior at all levels of society.

“A lot of people don’t really understand what the word ethics means,” said Bedley, author of several books on “values-based” education. “What we tried to do is to say that the city must go beyond its laws to form a code of ethics.”