By Suzanne Sprague
Dallas, TX – Ambient sound of a Dallas City Council meeting, with Council members yelling at each other and the mayor banging a gavel on the table
Suzanne Sprague, KERA 90.1 Reporter: Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk said early in the day that if the ethics code debate were a horse race, all of the City Council's horses would run out of the gate and stop in their tracks.
Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk: We have a couple of members of the Council that want to use this as a way to say, "We have ethics. They don't. They're against it."
Sprague: Perhaps not surprisingly, the mayor was frequently at odds with Council Member Laura Miller. Unlike the mayor, Miller favored accepting the proposed code as it was written by a 15-member task force. And she was particularly upset when Kirk favored striking a provision that would have kept council members from voting if one of their clients had an issue before the city.
Council Member Laura Miller: He and Don Hill wanted to remove it, and luckily a few people like Sandy Greyson came up with a compromise. So it is not in the best form it could be in. But it is still in.
Sprague: The revised rule sets up one case when council members can't vote and one case when they can. Laura Miller explains.
Miller: If you've gotten money from a client in the last 12 months, then you have an issue. If they hired you yesterday and you haven't gotten any money yet, you can go ahead and vote for it. Now, that to me is totally improper.
Sprague: There were other compromises as well. A majority of council members said they would favor establishing an ethics commission to enforce the proposed regulations, but they decided to make it a seven-member panel instead of the task force's recommended 15. However, there was great disagreement on what to do with the nepotism proposal, which would prevent council members from appointing their immediate relatives to boards and commissions. Councilwoman Lois Finkelman.
Council Member Lois Finkelman: The perception out there, rightly or wrongly, is that when council members have relatives serving on boards and commissions, they do have an undue amount of ability to influence colleagues and, by extension, I think, potentially staff.
Sprague: Councilman Don Hill said he wasn't interested in perception.
Council Member Don Hill: When we start talking about perception, and we start talking about an assumption that a person is not going to act in the best interest of their constituents, I'm not going to vote for anything that has that as an underlying assumption.
Sprague: The nepotism policy was accepted and even extended to prohibit council members from appointing their paid campaign workers to boards and commissions. Earlier, Mayor Kirk had said the ethics policy wouldn't come up for a formal vote until after the Council's July vacation. But he told reporters Thursday he's moved the day up to the end of this month.
Kirk: For all these folks who say they want a chance to vote on a strengthened ethics commission, I'm going to give them that chance to do that, and I'm going to make sure we're going to have something to vote on June the 28th.
Sprague: Council member Laura Miller said she'd rather vote later in the year if it would mean restoring some of the provisions removed during Thursday's discussion. But State Judge John Creuzot, who helped write the proposed ethics code, hoped the Council would give the document their formal support.
John Creuzot, Judge, Criminal District Court No. 4: The code that we proposed and even, from my understanding, what was done here today is still stronger than the current code, so if they vote it down I'll be disappointed.
Sprague: For KERA 90.1, I'm Suzanne Sprague.