“The people must be able to remain informed if they are to retain control over those who are their public servants. It is the only climate under which the general welfare will prosper and enable the governmental process to operate for the benefit of those who created it.”
— Legislative Declaration, Public Officers Law, Article 7
The ethics board for the City of Kingston plays a difficult role, as do all public ethics boards.
Charged with sifting through allegations of impropriety, weighing the evidence and actions pointed out in complaints, the board must endeavor to discover the intention of both accused and accuser. But like the Beefeaters in the tall bearskin hats who stand guard outside Buckingham Palace, the members must remain tight-lipped in the face of provocation.
“Think of it like at a high school,” says board member Charlotte Adamis. “Someone complains my coach did this, or my teacher did whatever. We have to protect that person, protect their privacy until the claim can be proven. If something is unfounded, can you imagine the stress it can cause someone?”
The board acknowledges receiving filed complaints, but until a determination is reached will provide little other information to a curious public or to the person who filed a complaint.
“I can’t even go home and tell my husband,” says Adamis. “I can say we have a complaint tonight. And that’s it.”
“It would be like giving up your source,” adds board chair Allen Nace.
Every now and then, despite the best efforts of the ethics board, the subjects and details of charges filed get leaked to the press, most often by the accusers filing them.
That old-time religion
It’s not uncommon for ethical questions to be framed in religious terms, as the penalty for a host of transgressions can lead to the shame of censure and public ostracism. In more secular terms, a fine or loss of position are possible.
“I think morals and ethics always get compounded and confused,” says Nace. “A moral system is different. There’s a variety of ethical codes which are different than municipal ethics.”
The ethics of a bricklayer may differ from the ethics of a priest. “If you’re a licensed professional,” says Nace, “each profession has a code that is different than the next.”
To deepen its members’ understanding of the subject they ride herd on, board members have had study groups, have completed online courses, and have read Aristotle on the subject.
Kingston’s city charter notes the importance of ethics. A high standard of moral conduct is to be expected if public confidence in city government is is to be maintained.
What are municipal ethics? It all boils down to the appearance, if not the fact, of receiving money for trading on one’s position.
Chapter 49 of the Kingston city charter sets the rules and serves as a guide for the conduct of its officers and employees. Here’s a layperson’s interlinear translation, communicated here in the language of the Decalogue:
Thou shalt not leverage one’s governmental access to enrich thyself, thy family or thy buddies. Thou shalt not trade on confidential information. Thou shalt not bet against the city that one represents. Thou shalt not accept gifts as exchange for incentives or rewards. Thou shalt not threaten, coerce, nor solicit the allegiance of thy brothers or sisters of the civil service to come over to any organization or try to corral their votes for any candidate during working hours. And especially shalt thou not threaten, coerce, solicit nor induce thy city brothers or sisters to violate the provisions of these code of ethics. None of these things shall the city officer or employee do in the municipal name.
Amen.
All hell breaks loose
Perhaps it’s a testament to the high ethical caliber of Kingston public servants that the most recent individual found to have transgressed the ethical boundaries of the City of Kingston was back in 2016, when Ward 3 councilmember Brad Will was found guilty for the second time of an ethics-law violation. Will had appeared before the Heritage Area Commission on behalf of a client, while serving as a councilmember. This was judged unethical. Shortly thereafter, Will resigned from the common council.
According to ethics board meeting minutes from 2020 forward, eight ethics complaints were filed in 2020 and nine in 2021. Full minutes for 2022 are spotty..
“In terms of reviewing ethical complaints that come before the board of ethics,” Nace reported at a January 2022 meeting, “the last two years have been really pretty busy. Last year was mostly busy, with finishing up the abundance of complaints that came in during 2020.”
In February 2020 all hell broke loose when mayor Steve Noble announced his plan to merge the departments of parks and recreation into the department of public works, creating a new position, deputy of environmental services. What set off the warning lights was that the mayor had selected his spouse for the job, with a $20,000 pay raise.
Complaints immediately followed. A letter of recommendation was prepared for the mayor highlighting the concerns of the ethics board. Before the dust settled, the city corporation counsel, common council members, the ethics board and private citizens all reached out to the state attorney general’s office for its legal opinion.
Adding another layer of complexity to the situation, ethics board chair Nace served on the board of commissioners for both the parks department and the DPW. Board member at the time Jackie DeCicco worked at the city hall as executive secretary of the Kingston civil service commission. As the five-member board was one member short, the ethics board would no longer have been able to achieve a quorum if both Nace and DeCicco were to have recused themselves, the ethics board would have ceased to function.
Nace recused himself from the city department boards rather than recuse himself from the ethics board. DeCiccio kept on as she was.
Though the mayor solicits recommendations for three members of the ethics board from the common council, it is the mayor who appoints the members of the ethics board, and it is the mayor who can remove them.
When the board finally decided against bringing charges, more than a year had passed. and only one complaint remained from the mayor’s imbroglio. As the departmental merger never happened and the position of deputy of environmental services was never created, the matter was apparently moot.
Details leaked again In a high-profile ethics complaint in January 2022. Ward 8 councilmember Steve Schabot was hit with a complaint alleging that his yes vote benefited The Kingstonian, a project organized by his part-time employer, Brad Jordan, the owner of Herzog’s. Jordan was one of the partners in the JM Development Group LLC, working to build The Kingstonian.
“The complaints that are presented to the ethics board,” notes Nace, “appear to be based more on what a reasonable person may consider a violation of ethics. However, the code as it’s written doesn’t necessarily reflect that. The board has had many discussions on the status of the code, and what it says rather than what people think that it says.”
Compulsory disclosure
The compulsory filing of financial disclosures is one area in which ethical behavior is explained by what it is as opposed to what it is not. There is no gray area here. The long list of officials expected to file these reports annually includes the mayor and the members of the ethics board themselves.
Kingston’s ethics board has struggled to gain timely compliance with this mandate. Year after year, the required financial disclosures were handed in late, filled out incompletely or incorrectly, or in a very small percentage of those on the long list handed in not at all.
For every year from 2018 and 2022, anywhere from ten to 21 disclosures were filed from five to eleven months late. Because the ethics board meets infrequently and its minutes are not immediately published, it’s hard to keep tabs on exactly when the late submissions are finally received.
Board meeting minutes from January 2022 say that an estimated ten to 15 disclosures had not been received by the board, a full eleven months after the February 15, 2021 filing deadline. Another 21 disclosures were late at least five months in 2021. By November 5, 2020, three disclosures were a full eight months late. And in 2019, 17 employees and/or officers had neglected to turn in their financial disclosure statements for 2018 eleven months past the deadline
“There were early years when there were many people either not used to submitting disclosures or they didn’t understand the disclosures,” explains Nace. “We would contact them and remind them, then contact and insist …. As time went on, we became more insistent on the date of filing. Each year there seemed to be improvements. In recent years, we sought to impose a civil penalty for those individuals who appeared reluctant to comply. However, we were to find out that some of those individuals were no longer on boards and did not have to comply. It was also revealed that there was an issue with who would collect the money, where would it go, and what would it be used for.”
Nace says that in 2022 all required individuals filed their disclosures.
Proactive, not punitive
The ethics board is not completely toothless. It is empowered to hold hearings, subpoena witnesses and require the production of books or records it may deem relevant and material, Should any city officer or employee have been found to violate the conduct permitted, contracts could be voided and civil penalties of up to $10,000 extracted. Disciplinary action, including up to termination could result as well as referral for misdemeanor prosecution.
Chair Nace emphasizes his desire for the board to be primarily proactive rather than punitive.
“We expressed to the common council our desire to have the ethics board be more educational in nature,” says Nace, “and hope we can work proactively to prevent future ethical violations. A lot of it seems to be from a lack of awareness and how it applies. In the meeting with the laws and rules I suggested, as the board had suggested, that it’d be a ethics training at hire and an annual update so that people are aware of what the ethical expectations are.”
An effort is currently under way to have the common council review the code and consider revision to sections that could be made more clear.
“Alderman-at-large Andrea Shaut, members of the ethics board, and corporation counsel are meeting to review the code,” says Nace. “It will be quite a task. It is my hope that it becomes a more easily understood code that becomes clear to a reasonable person.”
The ethics board has been chronically short one member over the years, which, imperils its functioning should recusals prove desirable. While Nace and Micheal Decker have been with the board since 2017 the newer members, Adamis and Barbara Sarah, were both appointed in the summer of 2021. The board remains not fully constituted.
“We have been without a fifth member for quite a while,” says Nace. “We have asked the mayor and common council to appoint someone on more than one occasion. It is my hope they are in that process now.”
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