by Joe Wilhelm Jr.
Staff Writer
Though an issue of much recent discussion and debate, a charter amendment to return the City’s Ethics Code to the City charter quietly received unanimous approval from the City Council Nov. 23.
The next step is to address the details of some of the authority granted to the Ethics Commission in the amendment.
Returning the City’s Ethics Code to the charter was an issue City Council President Jack Webb included in his list of priorities during his inaugural address.
But Webb delayed the passing of the amendment to allow council committees to thoroughly review the legislation.
“At the beginning of my term as president, I made a commitment that we were going to return ethics to the City charter and that’s what we have done,” Webb said Monday.
“The details are not in the charter. We need to go to work now and get the details done,” he said.
Council member Glorious Johnson sponsored bill 2010-616 and was glad to see the support of the council last week.
“You would think everyone would be in accordance to vote for the ethics bill and it wouldn’t take this long to return ethics to the City charter. It was being questioned for a while, but I don’t think anyone wanted to be seen as not supporting an ethics bill,” said Johnson.
“I was glad to see the unanimous support of my fellow legislators,” she said.
As a consolidated government, the council has the authority to “repeal or amend any provision of this charter, and adopt other provisions of this charter, by ordinance, to the same extent as could be done by the Legislature of the State of Florida,” according to the City charter.
The “details” Webb refers to include the structure of “civil fines or penalties authorized by the City Council for violations of the City’s Ethics Code” and defining what “mechanism” the City Council will provide the Ethics Commission for “obtaining documents and testimony in connection with violations of the City’s Ethics Code.”
These two issues were discussed and debated by the council’s Rules and Finance committees and its Special Committee to Review the Recommendations of the Charter Revision Commission.
Because of the amount of discussion and proposed amendments to the bill, some council members were surprised when an early version of the bill was approved unanimously on the consent agenda Tuesday.
The consent agenda is a group of items that are voted on as one item and normally consist of routine and non-controversial items, such as meeting minutes.
“I fully expected it to be pulled from the consent agenda and discussed, and possibly a floor amendment added. But that didn’t happen. I was surprised,” said council member John Crescimbeni, who, along with Johnson, pushed for the council to vote on the amendment at the local level.
Crescimbeni also introduced a similar bill, J-6, to be considered by the Duval Legislative Delegation. The move was originally made to offset a defeat of the bill locally, but Crescimbeni has no plans to pull the bill now that the local amendment has passed.
“We’ll let it track on schedule. The reason for that is that some of the independent authorities believe that the city can’t bind them to do anything because some are state agencies and others are hybrids that have members appointed by the governor and some appointed by the mayor,” said Crescimbeni.
“We are awaiting an opinion from the Office of General Counsel that should be presented in the near future,” he said.
City Ethics Officer Carla Miller was pleased with the passage of the bill and has already begun to work with Webb to develop the language of the details.
“There needs to be a lot of communication and cooperation in the future to get us to where we need to go,” said Miller.
“We (Webb and Miller) have started to discuss the code issues. There will be a lot of work with myself and the Office of General Counsel to prepare information for City Council review,” she said.
The City’s Ethics Commission is also accepting applications for a seat that will be vacated by Scott Shine. The applications need to be submitted by Friday and more information can be found on the City’s website, www.coj.net, or by contacting the Ethics Office at 630-1476.
356-2466