Officials discuss adding code of ethics
The Longmont City Council Tuesday discussed adopting a code of ethics — mainly a conflict of interest policy — for council members to follow.
Mayor Joan Peck and the city’s legal team created a draft document that specifies how local officials must conduct themselves and the process for handling ethical complaints made against council and board members.
The city’s code of ethics plan would prohibit a council or board member from disclosing or using confidential information that they obtained in their official capacity to further their own “personal or financial interest,” according to the draft document.
It also would bar a city official from “discussing with, or otherwise attempting in any capacity to influence, directly or indirectly, any city officer or employee,” about a matter in which the official has a conflict of interest.
Peck said in advance of the meeting that the council’s discussion of a code of ethics was not in response to anything that had happened recently.
“The main thing is we are a self-policing body but we have no process and never have,” Peck said of the city council.
Like any government agency, Longmont receives complaints about elected and appointed officials but does not have an official, prescribed way of dealing with them currently, Peck said.
However, like city councils across Colorado, public officials in Longmont are bound by state laws that require them to act generally in the public’s interest and watch over the public’s money. Violating those laws can bring criminal penalties.
In Longmont, if council members approve the code of ethics, anyone would be allowed to file a complaint online if they believed a local official violated the city’s code. From there, the complaint would go to an independent hearing officer who would review the matter and, if warranted, make a recommendation to the council concerning it.
The council would then decide whether or not to accept the hearing officer’s recommendation and determine what, if any, penalty should be given. If the complaint involved a current council member, that individual would not be able to vote on the matter.
Penalties could include reprimand, censure, suspension or removal of an appointed person from a board, commission or committee.
A hearing officer could be an outside lawyer or law firm that the city would contract with to make recommendations concerning potential ethical violations.
“The biggest issue for us is we did not want (city) staff involved in any of this,” said Harold Dominguez, Longmont city manager.
Last year, the council discussed establishing an ethics committee but none ever came to fruition. At the time, some council members expressed concerns about how often such a committee would convene and questioned who, exactly, would serve on it so that it would not become politicized.
The council may vote on adopting the code of ethics for council and board members at a future meeting.
In addition to the city council, Longmont has 22 citizen-based boards, committees and commissions that roughly 170 citizens serve on, according to the city’s website.