Call it Round 2 in the fight over whether Lincoln City Council members should be able to do business with the city.
DEENA WINTER / Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Tuesday, April 1, 2008 7:00 pm
Call it Round 2 in the fight over whether Lincoln City Council members should be able to do business with the city.
Last month Republicans on the council shot down a proposed charter amendment to ban council members and city directors from having city contracts.
But this month Republican Councilman John Spatz will be back with an alternative: a city ordinance that would allow city employees and elected officials to have city contracts, but require them to jump through a few more hoops if they have a “significant financial interest” in the contract. He says the ordinance would add more transparency and accountability to the process.
He expects the other Republicans on the council — there are four, compared with the three Democrats — to support his proposal.
However, plans for a petition drive to get the charter amendment on a ballot are still going forward. Vic Covalt, a prominent Democrat who was a member of the Charter Revision Committee that recommended an all-out ban, says he’ll press on with a petition drive to get the charter amendment on the November ballot.
He called Spatz’s plan “loopholes, loopholes, loopholes.”
“That’s what we’ve got right now,” Covalt said. “These are just better loopholes.”
Asked whether he had talked to Covalt about his alternative, Spatz said he can’t think of another person in the city he’d be less likely to discuss the issue with, noting that Covalt is running for chairman of the state Democratic Party.
“If I thought for a minute he would consider visiting with me on this, I would,” Spatz said.
Covalt didn’t sound interested in talks either.
“I’m not interested in negotiating on loopholes,” he said.
In response to Spatz’s implication that Covalt is just playing politics, Covalt said Spatz is doing the same: “He’s as much a Republican as I’m a Democrat.”
Covalt said neither Democrats nor Republicans should have city contracts, including his friend and former Democratic councilman Terry Werner, who had a small city contract while serving on the council.
Spatz, who is also an attorney, said his ordinance would not be an all-out ban — which the Republicans believe would deter many good business people from running for city offices — but would “tighten up the process.”
“Really what we’re doing is we’re making it much more difficult for an elected official to do this, but we’re not saying ‘no,’ ” Spatz said. “We’re not going to say no under all circumstances.”
Spatz’s ordinance would require candidates for city offices to publicly disclose any significant financial interest in city bids or contracts. The council would have to vote on the contract, and, if a council member were the bidder, he or she would not be allowed to be present.
Spatz is also considering adding language to handle situations where the city employee or council member has performance problems on the contract.
Spatz said he’s proposing the ordinance — which is tentatively scheduled for a public hearing on April 14 — because even though he opposed an all-out ban, he believes the council should have high “standards of behavior.”
“I didn’t like being portrayed as someone who’s not kind of a stickler for transparency,” he said. And by putting the language in an ordinance, rather than the difficult-to-amend city charter, he said, changes can be made if it isn’t working.
A good portion of the language in Spatz’s draft ordinance is devoted to an ethics code for employees and officers of the city. Employees would not be allowed to use city property for personal use or accept favors or benefits that could be construed to influence the performance of their duties.
Covalt said an ethics code would be a “radical idea for them,” since the council has had one tabled since 2002.
“I’m sure glad he’s finally gonna do his job,” Covalt said of Spatz’s ethics code. Covalt is also working on an ethics code for the council.
City Purchasing Agent Vince Mejer said he didn’t have an opinion on Spatz’s proposal because he hadn’t been contacted about it.
Reach Deena Winter at 473-2642 or dwinter@journalstar.com.