After seven months of debate, the Providence City Council has voted unanimously to pass a new ethics ordinance for the city.
The measure specifically prohibits certain actions, such as hiring for “no-show jobs,” and many situations that would create a conflict of interest. It also covers campaign ethics, and it establishes an Ethics Commission and a municipal integrity officer position.
“I think that taking the time and doing our due diligence was really important for the council to do, and I think it will assure that some of the past problems that have happened do not happen because people have no excuse that they didn’t know,” said Rita Williams, a City Council member and chairwoman of the Ordinance Committee. “We need to have the highest standards for conduct, and this is a good step forward to make sure that happens.”
Yvonne Graf, manager of policy and research for the City Council, said officials employed the help of the Council On Governmental Ethics Laws. COGEL is a professional organization that helps governments, individuals and organizations with to ethics, elections, lobby law and freedom of information concerns.
With COGEL’s help, the council had lawyer R. Kelly Sheridan draft the ordinance. According to Graf, the council used “a pretty significant amount” of the organization’s suggestions in planning the final draft.
“The City Council [also] looked nationwide at what other municipalities had done,” Williams said.
By covering issues that are not addressed in the state’s ethics code, Williams said, the ordinance leaves no room for confusion as to what is, or is not, ethical for city employees and elected officials.
“The items are very specific because we felt simple language like that was important,” said Williams.
The ordinance does not repeat language from the state’s code, because it is designed to “deal with items that municipalities have trouble with,” she said. “It’s dealing with conflicts of interests and taking advantage of knowledge you may have as a city employee to gain money.”
Additionally, the ordinance outlines the creation of an Ethics Commission that will issue advisory opinions to city employees and investigate any situations that appear to violate the city’s ethics code. If the commission determines through an investigation that the ethics code has been violated, it will pass on the matter to either the city solicitor or the R.I. Ethics Commission for further review.
The new city commission will include three members appointed by the City Council, three members appointed by the mayor and one member, who will become the chair, appointed by the majority vote of the other six members.
The ordinance also creates a municipal integrity officer position. The officer will be responsible for developing ethics training for city employees and officials, publishing an ethics handbook and establishing, with the commission, a hot line for members of the public to report potential ethics violations.
“I’m hoping by having the hot line, the public will have an objective place to go to bring any concerns to the ethics commission,” Williams said. “Given the history of Providence government, that’s really important.”
The current ordinance was drastically scaled down from the original ordinance put together by the Mayor’s Ethics Task Force in 2005, but Karen Southern, spokeswoman for Mayor David N. Cicilline, said those issues have been worked out.
Originally, the ordinance called for steeper penalties than does the state’s ethics code – but that had to be changed, because it would have been illegal, Williams said.
One other change, which Cicilline had strongly opposed, was the removal of a “revolving-door” provision. The provision would have made it unlawful for an elected official to “seek or accept employment from a municipal agency” both while in office and for one year after leaving office.
The measure was eventually put back in – with a stipulation that it will be removed from the city ordinance if the state adopts a similar provision.
