Adding insult to injury
A big ethics breach yields a slap on the wrist
The tepid penalty for an outrageous conflict of interest within Pittsburgh city government does nothing to assure the public that the stench of unethical behavior has faded from city hall.
Pittsburgh real estate manager Aaron Pickett sold himself a cityowned house assessed upwards of $ 100,000 for the piddling price of $ 2,500. To the most casual observer, the odor of pecuniary conflict could be smelled throughout the city and beyond.
The obvious conflict was underscored as flat- out wrong by virtue of a determination last week from the state Ethics Commission that Mr. Pickett must pay a penalty of $ 5,000 within 30 days and the payment cannot be reimbursed by the city. ( We would hope not.)
Furthermore, if he sells the house at a profit of more than $ 5,000 within the next five years, he must forfeit that profit to the state.
Mr. Pickett appears to be in the clear in terms of any fallout from his bosses in government because the city has no rule barring employees from selling themselves public property.
As if there weren’t already sneaky ways for employees in both the public and private sectors ( and their friends and family) to benefit from inside knowledge and easy access to information. The least citizens should be able to expect from local government is a policy that bans explicit pecuniary conflict of interest as well as an ethics commission with the will and the way to enforce the policy.
Well, the city has an ethics code as well as an ethics commission and if that commission isn’t already engaged in a look- see on this case, it should get engaged right away.
Mr. Pickett bought a house in Beechview through the city’s process for disposing of abandoned and taxdelinquent properties — a process he manages. He approved the purchase price ( hmm) and signed the court papers as both seller and purchaser as part of a process that began with an application in March 2016. City Council had to approve it and the deed transfer was completed in June 2017. ( Double hmm.)
The Pittsburgh Post- Gazette’s Rich Lord reported the sale last summer, after the deed was made public in April 2018. Mr. Lord explained that the house was assessed by Allegheny County at $ 102,600, and three other prospective buyers had filed applications to purchase it. One of those would- be buyers recounted his willingness to have paid as much as $ 40,000. Such interest should have triggered a court- supervised auction but the city’s real estate department did not set that procedure in motion. ( Triple hmm.) According to the Ethics Commission’s order, Mr. Pickett violated the Ethics Act when he “assessed and set the sale price of real property owned/ held by the city, at a time when he possessed a reasonable interest in purchasing the property for himself” and “executed a Proposal to Purchase agreement between the city and himself concerning the sale of real property.”
Margaret Lanier, the city’s finance director and treasurer, told Mr. Lord she has proposed a policy that would bar the purchase of city property by the employees who handle the sales of such properties but the exact wording of the policy has been undergoing debate. For months. Here’s a suggestion for the wording: City property can’t be purchased by employees who handle the sales of such properties. Done.
Mr. Pickett should have faced a higher penalty from the Ethics Commission. A black mark should be in his personnel file for his bad judgment. The city needs to ban such sales in the future. And the city’s ethics commission should do more than its state counterpart’s slap on the wrist.