Council Watch

As titles go, perhaps none is more inappropiate than that of the Ethics Review Commission - not for the members' lack of ethical standing, but for the fact that the seven-person group has reviewed just one alleged conflict of interest in two and a half years.

That doesn't mean the register of local politicians is made up of saints. The commission completely overlooked at least one glaring conflict of interest, Councilmember Eric Mitchell's vote last December to approve a city subcontract for his own insurance company. While City Manager Jesus Garza later decreed that no wrong-doing had taken place (see feature article), Mitchell's vote probably warranted looking into. But in fact, the commission - made up of seven members appointed by council - never endeavored to investigate that case.

You can't really blame the commission: The mechanism for initiating a conflict of interest investigation is through a complaint process. Complaints must be initiated by someone outside the commission, and few have been.

Even if the commission did have the authority to initiate complaints, the city's legal staff would still have to authorize an investigation before the commission could weigh the case. You'd probably have more success getting a tobacco exec to admit the dangers of smoking. "To get down to the real nitty-gritty, the legal staff is responsible to the city manager, and the city manager is responsible to the council. It's kind of hard to say something that's going to reflect badly on the people who control your job," says Jett Hanna, chair of the Ethics Review Commission and Max Nofziger's appointee. (On a societal note: Hanna is also the husband of Jackie Goodman's executive assistant.)

In that same vein, the fact that board and commission members are appointed by the council may explain why the legal staff has found no outlawry in numerous potential cases involving said members. In the one investigation authorized by the city legal staff in the past two and a half years, the commission unanimously declared innocence.

Last December, Brigid Shea pushed through several amendments to the campaign finance ordinance, including an attempt to alleviate the bias by allowing two non-governmental organizations, the League of Women Voters and the Travis County Bar Association, to appoint a member apiece to the commission, bringing it to nine members. Those appointments are expected within the next 60 days.

Due in part to Shea's amendments (her most notable accomplishment in over two years on the council), the group has found new life. Previously, Hanna says, they held "very short" meetings once a quarter; now the meetings are longer, and take place once a month. Their newfound vivacity may not immediately lead to more, or better, investigations, but it will help rein in lobbyists and special interest groups.

Over the next few weeks, the commission aims to strengthen Shea's amendments so that lobbyist activity reports, available for public perusal at the city clerk's office, disclose both individual lobbyists and the firm for which they work. Currently, firms may register without revealing individual lobbyists, which creates at least three problems:

* The average citizen can't know who works for what company on what issue;

* Lobbyists or their firms, depending on whichever doesn't register, can breach the city's $25 lobbyist campaign contribution cap;

* Numerous lobbyists, all working for one firm, can evade the city's $300 lobbyist registration fee. Those fees, according to Shea's amendments, are supposed to be pooled to fund election run-offs.

The commission will try to close those loopholes, and others, and present their recommendations to the council in early October.

But even with the changes, which the entire council is likely to support, the commission has nothing on the table to strengthen the enforcement mechanism. Those problems will continue to linger. To begin with, Hanna says, his group of volunteers has no time to check the lobbyist and council campaign contribution reports streaming into the clerk's office. "I have no idea of what's actually going on out there," he says. "We just are not in a position where we can go through all that stuff."

Which means the group doesn't know that Gus Garcia's latest con-tribution and expenditure report, covering the first six months of this year, violates the ordinance. The grounds: failure to disclose the occupation of the numerous (26) contributors who kicked in more than $250. Nor did they know that Mitchell's report covering the last six months of 1994 suffered from the same oversight.

Anyway, all the ethics commission can do if they find violations is "stand up on a chair and say that something bad is going on," says Hanna. While Shea's amendments raised the punishment for violations to a class C misdemeanor, attempts at enforcement seem pointless - as in conflict of interest cases, the path for prosecution again begins in the city attorney's office. "The enforcement is a huge problem," says Hanna. "The problem is, how do you do it short of an independent prosecutor who can pursue that kind of stuff, someone who's going to be insulated, who can take the initiative for saying `so and so busted the law,' and keep it from being in tilted in one direction?"

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This week in council: Come for the thrills. Really. Mitchell has thrown one of the year's most controversial issues onto the agenda at the last minute: the proposed land swap of five city-owned parcels for six lots owned by ex-congressional candidate and Eastside developer Jo Baylor. Four of the lots, located in the heart of the predominately white Swede Hill Neighborhood, are currently used as unofficial parkland. Mitchell has refused to meet with the neighborhood association about the possibility of residential displacement; during their last encounter, at a council housing subcommittee meeting, Mitchell excoriated the residents of the neighborhood with a loud "Screw you!" (See feature.) n