A Message from Ann Margolin
November 2, 2009 Last Wednesday the City Council agreed to a package of ordinances to address ethics issues. I want to address this in two parts by discussing what happened and what we did.
Ethics Reform: What Happened
What happened? Presumably as a result of the Don Hill case, Mayor Leppert felt a great urgency about passing ethics reform ordinances. While I (and the huge majority of the council) wanted to see ethics reform, I wanted to see it done well.
These ordinances are not simple. It may sound simple to say we should register lobbyists but you have to carefully define lobbyist or you risk including neighborhood associations that talk to their council member about a zoning case.
What does it mean to register? What are the reporting requirements? Do contacts with staff have to be reported or just council members? What are the fees? If you are going to prohibit contributions from a developer during a zoning case, when does the zoning case start? Each of these questions needs careful consideration.
The Dallas Morning News contributed to this sense of urgency and implied that council members were resisting and dragging our feet. I promise you that I was not and I don’t believe this was true for the huge majority of the council. We had our first full briefing on the subject on October 19, nine days before it came to the council as an agenda item.
I spent much of the next week reading it, looking at what other cities have done and working to make it stronger. I spent hours working with Council Member Linda Koop to develop amendments that would beef up the proposal by including applicants for a variety of tax breaks and city contracts as well as applicants for zoning changes.
At the start of our Wednesday meeting a motion was made to delay the vote until December 16 with two briefings in between to create time to work on the ordinance. I supported the motion but it failed.
We spent the next three hours discussing and hammering out various amendments and making good progress. Normally this sort of work is done prior to a council meeting. I do not believe that this was the appropriate place to be doing this, but at least we were getting it done.
About three hours into the meeting a motion was made that would have deferred the vote until December 16. Since we were making good progress I voted against that motion.
At that time I asked the mayor to bring the final version back for a vote in two weeks (to give the city attorney time to put our amendments into legal language and the council time to read the final version). He agreed to do that. Previously he had wanted us to vote on it at Wednesday’s meeting.
That is where it stands right now.
For more information on the substance of what was done, please see the article on Ethics Reform: What We Did.
Return to home |
