Ethics must be emphasized

Oct. 4, 2007
By Dave Boyer
Inquirer Editorial Board

Corey Kemp, the corrupt former treasurer of Philadelphia, could have benefited from the advice of someone like Oscar McFly.

A creation of the New York City Conflicts of Interest Board, McFly is a fictitious online character who "works" as a purchasing manager for the city. In his adventures, McFly continually confronts ethical challenges, presented as an interactive quiz at www.nyc.gov/html/conflicts/html/quiz/quiz01.shtml

In one example, Oscar is invited to dinner by Veronica, "a salesperson who represents one of the companies that Oscar deals with regularly." Oscar's half of the dinner is $90. Veronica picks up the tab for both of them. "Is this OK?" the quiz asks online participants.

The correct answer, as the bribable and now-incarcerated Kemp by now might guess, is "no." On the site, you get an explanation in plain English of New York's ethics law: Full-time city employees cannot accept any gift of $50 or more from anyone doing business with the city. The annual gift limit is cumulative.

"When you work for the City, there is no free lunch," the Web site explains.

Maybe Kemp would have ignored Oscar McFly as lame. After all, the culture of public corruption has deep roots in Philadelphia.

And no one could claim that teaching tools such as McFly have eradicated public corruption in Gotham. The point is, New York City now goes out of its way to educate its employees and the public about what is prohibited and what is allowed in daily city business.

New York's effort bespeaks an attitude that has been sorely missing among elected leaders in Philadelphia until very recently. More than 30 people connected to City Hall were indicted in pay-to-play scandals in the last four years. On the city's Web site, despite the efforts of a new and improved Board of Ethics, it is still easier to find out how to submit a bid to provide a city agency with "cherries, maraschino, no stems, not less than 12 per ounce" than it is to find all the ethics guidelines governing city contracts.

At Great Expectations forums, citizens frequently express disgust at the city's reputation as "the capital of pay-to-play." They understand that corruption, cronyism and nepotism in a one-party town breed waste, weak city services, and apathy.

"If we cannot believe in the honesty and high ethical standards of our leadership, we are unlikely to believe, much less act on, our own abilities to transcend the often-lamented 'old Philadelphia,' " Tom Vernon of Philadelphia wrote in a "Yo, Mike!" posting addressed to Democratic mayoral nominee Michael Nutter.

Philadelphia Democrats voted that sentiment in May; the top two finishers in a five-way primary, Nutter and Tom Knox, both made reform the byword of their campaigns.

One of the best ways to beat back "old Philadelphia" is to limit the campaign donations that often serve as calling cards for no-bid city contracts. While a councilman, Nutter succeeded in enacting limits for the first time in this year's elections: $5,000 per individual donor, $20,000 per political-action committee in the mayor's race. Another rule he helped push through limits how much firms that get no-bid city contracts can give.

Still, the primary campaign seemed for a while to be undermining, not buttressing, the case for limits. Knox spent millions of his own money on his campaign, and led for a time in the polls. In the end, though, the candidate who authored the limits and lived by them won.

Knox's self-financing did trigger a provision in the campaign law that doubles the donation limits for mayor this year. That has had the dubious result of allowing Nutter to raise money like crazy this fall, even though he faces a long-shot foe, not a millionaire.

"The biggest issue is how to make this campaign-finance law as strong as possible," said Zack Stalberg, president and CEO of the Committee of Seventy, a nonpartisan group advocating ethics reform. The committee wants the next mayor to appoint a panel to review how the law is working and propose changes.

Among the concerns is how to limit campaign expenditures by independent groups known as "527s," for the section of the tax code that governs them. Such groups made their debut in mayoral politics this spring, funding mysterious attack ads against candidates. Expect more of that. Spending by such groups has grown in influence even in cities with progressive campaign-finance laws, such as Los Angeles. In city elections there in 2005, independent groups spent $4.2 million, 86 percent of it coming from labor.

Public financing of campaigns has mostly worked well in Los Angeles and New York, but Nutter and his opponent, Al Taubenberger, are cool to the idea. Stalberg said it would be a tough sell in Philadelphia to persuade disgusted voters to spend their tax money on political campaigns.

But that still leaves room for the new administration and Council to tackle other weak spots in the city's ethical armor - for example, by outlawing nepotism, disclosing lobbyists' expenses and banning gifts to city officials.

Campaign and ethics rules do two paradoxical things. They establish a higher standard that encourages the ethically inclined. But they also prompt people used to profiting from the old system to seek clever ways around the new rules.

The new mayor will need not only to strengthen the ethics standards now in place, but also to be vigilant to spot the new forms of pay-to-play as they rear their head.