by Joe Wilhelm Jr.
Staff Writer
The City’s Ethics Code was voted back into the City’s Charter in the fall, and now a City Council member, along with the Ethics Commission, is working on defining the future structure of the of the City’s Ethics program.
City Council member Art Shad introduced Ordinance 2011-167 Monday after working with City Ethics Officer Carla Miller and Steve Rohan of the City’s Office of General Counsel to draft the legislation.
“As chair of the City Council’s subcommittee to review the findings of the Charter Revision Commission, (Shad) was interested in seeing ethics legislation get passed,” said Miller. “The changes will be presented in three stages.”
The first stage is Ordinance 2011-167, an “upgrade of the ethics commission.”
Two of the bigger changes include adding qualifications for commission members and changing the commission member selection process from political to nonpolitical.
The proposed qualifications for members of the commission include: “Each member shall have one or more of the following qualifications: an attorney with litigation experience; a certified public accountant with forensic audit experience; a former elected official; a former judge; a higher
education faculty member or former faculty member with experience in ethics; a former law enforcement
official with experience in investigating public corruption; a corporate official with a background in human resources or ethics; a former board member of a City of Jacksonville independent authority; a former government executive with ethics experience.”
Commission members now can serve two consecutive two-year terms and are eligible to serve again after a two-year waiting period.
The new legislation asks for three-year terms and eligibility to return after a three-year waiting period.
There currently are no qualifications for ethics commission members in Chapter 602 of the Municipal Code and the com-mission wanted to change
that.
“Some other cities have qualifications built in and that’s what we wanted to do,” said Miller.
One of the other bigger changes is the way commission members are selected.
“There are two ways you can select your commission, the political way and the independent way,” said Miller.
“We wanted to get away from the political way, so we don’t have commissioners thinking, ‘I wonder how the person who appointed me would want me to
vote.’”
There are nine members on the commission, including one member each appointed by City Council, the mayor, the school board, the Civil Service Board, the state attorney and the chief judge of the Circuit Court.
The new system removes the appointment from the political process and makes it more independent, said Miller.
The new proposed selection process would include the dean of Florida Coastal School of Law, the director of the University of North Florida Ethics Center, the president of the Jacksonville League of Women Voters, the president of the D.W. Perkins Bar Association, the director of Jacksonville Community Council Inc. and the president of Florida State College at Jacksonville. Three members will also be selected by the commission.
The second stage is to develop rules and procedures to provide a structure for the investigation of citizen, hot line, employee or self-initiated complaints of violations.
Miller expects those rules to be available for review in the next two weeks.
The third stage is “cleaning up some of the code.” Miller stated that parts of the code are unnecessary and the Ethics Commission plans to review them to determine what needs to be eliminated.
Other new sections of the bill were pulled from the Palm Beach County Ethics Ordinance, which went into effect last year and had some “state-of-the-art” provisions, according to Miller.
“I think that this is a very positive upgrade for the Ethics Commission,” said Miller. “We are taking existing resources and making sure there isn’t any overlap. We are not creating more government.”
The changes need City Council approval and appointees will still have to be approved by the council.
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