Rich Rifkin is kind enough on his blog to share his thoughts on correspondence received from Councilmember Stephen Souza regarding the issue of firefighter donations. It is unfortunate, but I think the Councilmember misses a critical point here.
It is also unfortunate that Mr. Souza’s comments on Tuesday night demonstrated a lack of understanding about the amount of savings the city is really deriving from the MOUs. While Mr. Souza messed up the math which was rather humorous given his choice of words, the larger point is more serious.
That point not withstanding, I have focused on the firefighters contract because it wreaks of political favoritism. We have elsewhere gone to great lengths to show how much the firefighters have contributed to council candidates compared to their counterparts and it is not even close. In the last decade the firefighters gave tens of thousands to their chosen candidates compared to a scant few thousand for any other city employee or employee bargaining group in the city.
That does not mean that members of the council who take the money of firefighters and then vote to give them in 2005 a huge payraise of 36% over four years and now have given them a favorable contract given the budget times are corrupt and have done some as a form of political favoritism, but the appearance of a conflict is a problem. We have laws that preclude people who live too close to a project from voting on that project, but we have nothing preventing someone who receives money from a given groups of city employees to vote on their contract. Does that make any sense?
And so while the Councilmember can always fall back on the point that this is perfectly legal, the law does not define the limits of ethics. That’s really the point here, the ethics of accepting large amounts of money from city employees when in the long run you have to vote on their contract. How objective and scrutinizing can you be when that is the case? And even if you are, you will always be questioned on it.
Councilmember Souza sent a response to Rich Rifkin. It would be nice if he offered the same courtesy to the thousands of his constituents who read this site, but for now we have only his response to Mr. Rifkin.
According to Mr. Rifkin’s column Councilmember Souza wrote the following:
I for the last 21+ years of service to the City of Davis have always had the interests of all Davisites above myself and contributors to my four campaigns for Davis City Council.
In those campaigns I have been the largest contributor, $15,000 in 2004 and $6,000 in 2008. The next largest group is retired individuals, next working, next business/developer interest, and in the last two campaigns last firefighters.
This round of contract negotiations, my second, I asked for and the Council passed a set of Guiding Principles and Objectives for Negotiations Related to Employee Compensation. They are guiding me in seeking reductions in employee total compensation.
My service is to you and all Davisites. I do it in ALL Davisites favor, not in favor one person or group. Stephen
Rich Rifkin also offers his own thoughts on some of these points. I think he makes several good points. But I want to make one first. Stephen Souza who I disagree on a number of issues, I think is generally a well-intentioned person. Some may disagree with me, but I think he is. He has been at times a valuable swing vote that has moderated some of the council decisions. However, I think he often develops a blind-spot on certain issues. This is one of them.
When he talks about the amount of money he has raised, I am sure he is accurate in terms of who gave the most. But to me that does not really matter. Let us say a public official makes a salary of $150,000 per year and then goes and accepts a $10,000 bribe. Is he exonerated from accepting that bribe because it is a small percentage of his overall income and therefore less likely to influence his actions? Of course not. This is obviously not a direct bribe, but that is the logic at work.
In fact, we recognize this point in our campaign finance laws that limits the individual and group contributions to $100 per person. The firefighters have circumvented these laws in two important ways. First, they have bundled their contributions so that 40 or more individual firefighters all contribute the maximum contribution so that they collectively give $4000 per candidate rather than $100 as a group. Second, they also run their own independent expenditure campaign that consists of a mailer and a door hanger with their endorsed candidates on it. Again perfectly legal, but it enables them to spend a lot more than the legal limit for an individual.
Does that legal limit mean anything or is it just capricious? Have we done it because we acknowledge that allowing any one individual or group to contribute too much has a potential to corrupt the process or exert too high an influence? And yet by circumventing these laws through legal loopholes, the firefighters have done exactly that.
Rich Rifkin points out that the donations from the firefighters is the worst type of campaign cast to accept although he also argues that accepting cash from developers is problematic since the council will vote on the projects before them from the developers that may have contributed to their campaign.
Writes Mr. Rifkin about firefighter donations:
“This is by far the worst type of campaign cash to accept and then turn around and vote on their contract. It appears corrupt, especially since the only members of the City Council who favored their last contract took money from Local 3494 and none who did not get firefighter cash in the last four years approve that contract.
The appropriate tact for a candidate for the Davis City Council is to not accept contributions from groups like the firefighters or developers. However, in the case where a member of the council has accepted funds from individuals who stand to benefit from a vote of the council, that member of the council has a moral obligation to recuse himself from such a vote. When Stephen Souza, Don Saylor and Ruth Asmundson did not recuse themselves from the vote on the firefighter contract, they failed the moral test.”
As Rich Rifkin points out this creates the appearance of a conflict of interest:
“When you accept money from firefighters and vote on their behalf, you have created the appearance of a conflict of interest. To me, that is unacceptable, but correctable. What Stephen Souza and his colleagues on the council ought to do is take up this question in their ethics’ guidelines. They ought to make a recusal in such conflicted instances mandatory.
I have never claimed Stephen or anyone on the City Council is corrupt. I claim instead that they have allowed by their actions an appearance of corruption. And that claim, Stephen, is undeniably true.”
The final point I will bring up is that the council majority has fallen back on the guiding principles for their negotiation as the crutch to justify all their actions. There was some value in these principles, but as Rich Rifkin argues, it does not go nearly far enough.
“The guiding principles were not all I would have wanted. For example, they required no changes regarding union bank hours, excessive vacations and holidays and so on. However, they had some good in them and they let the public know in advance what the majority of the City Council was hoping to get out of its secret negotiations with the labor groups. As such, I applaud the notion of guiding principals.”
One problem is that we have not really taken the steps needed to solve the city’s problems. The council majority argued that this is a start to change, but the fact is that this was THE opportunity to get change because of the current economic crisis and we have allowed that opportunity to slip through our hands. The major changes are being PUNTED to the next council and the next council will not have a $3.5 million deficit to act as an ally and force the bargaining units to accept concessions.
The other problem is that these negotiations were done in secret. The city council intentionally did not allow advanced scrutiny on these deals. The Finance and Budget Commission on Monday once again complained about not having had the chance to review these contracts in a thirty-day sunshine period. Members of the public have complained. So what we have hear are closed door meetings that violate the spirit if not the letter of the open government clauses and debate has been quickly shut down by the mayor under the guise of a full agenda. The public is left out of this process and groups like the firefighters have the appearance of buying special access.
I conclude with this. I am disappointed that a decent person like Stephen Souza has a blindspot on this issue and I am disappointed because of what that means for other decisions that are made by this council and other governing bodies across the region, the state and the nation.
—David M. Greenwald reporting
