The Petty Hypocrisy of Mandatory Ethics Training

GELFAND’S WORLD-As a member of a neighborhood council board, I am required by state law to do 2 hours of ethics training every 2 years. Elected officials such as members of the City Council are also required to take this training. The curious thing about our California ethics rules is that they prohibit the small stuff while looking the other way when it comes to the massively unethical, but legal, system of campaign finance, and the built-in corruption it engenders. Just take a look at Jack Humphreville's recent column about why we don't trust our elected officials, and you will get a feel for how the system actually functions.  I intend to discuss a possible remedy for that problem in a later column. 

But for today, a little about the required ethics training, because it ought to make you either laugh or cry. 

In order for the elected official or neighborhood council appointee to fulfill the training requirement, the state has provided an online system. Mercifully, it has been upgraded and improved since the last time I took it. Now, it consists of a series of screens that you click through. 

The following is taken from the contents of one of the early screens: 

What does it mean for a public official to be "trustworthy"? 

Here are some thoughts on things you can do: 

Remember that your role is first and foremost to serve the community. 

Be truthful with your fellow elected officials, the public and others -- even when it involves speaking hard or unwelcome truths. 

Avoid any actions that would cause the public to question whether your decisions are based on personal interests instead of the public's interests. 

Do not accept gifts or other special considerations. 

Do not knowingly use false or inaccurate information. 

Do not use your public position for personal gain. 

Carefully consider any promises that you make (including campaign promises), and then keep them. 

A lot of this makes sense, and I'm sure that the vast majority of elected officials adhere to these rules, at least the ones who live on the planet Epsilon Beta in the antimatter galaxy SG1024. For those hoping to get reelected here in California, not so much, particularly when it comes to those parts about speaking unwelcome truths and keeping all your campaign promises. 

But the law says that we have to take ethics training, which means that some poor soul had to write the script for the online course. Apparently that poor soul couldn't resist doing a little preaching along with the legal boiler plate, as you can see in the excerpt quoted above. 

Me, I dutifully logged on and read through the screens. In one sense, it was actually useful, if only because it made short shrift of questionable practices engaged in by some of my neighborhood council colleagues. Behavior I've been complaining about was right there in the ethics training script. 

For example, making one's private business logo a part of a publicly funded outreach program is obviously a violation of at least one rule, the part about not using your public position for personal gain. 

I've also seen a spectacular violation of the state's open meeting law, when the majority of a neighborhood council board assembled in the parking lot after a particularly contentious meeting, and continued to discuss among themselves how to get out of the problems they had just created. That behavior certainly is prohibited under state law. I have to wonder how many of those board members were paying attention during their own ethics training, since the open meeting requirements are described at great length. 

I've also seen your tax dollars go to pay for neighborhood council publications that obviously served to improve the electoral chances of board candidates. That seems to violate a rule against the use of public resources for political purposes. It also seems to violate a rule against using publicly funded mass mailers to advance your own candidacy. 

The thing is, I think that most of us understand ethical conduct instinctively. A good hour of the training could have been replaced by the simple injunction, "don't steal from the public." Nevertheless, there are some prohibitions described in the training that are specific enough that they should allow you to identify particular technical violations. Most of us wouldn't be committing those violations anyway, but it should make it easier to point the finger at particularly egregious trespasses by others. 

So if you are ethical and are required to take the ethics training, it probably won't make you any more or less ethical yourself, but it may serve to educate you in what your friends and colleagues are doing. Think of it as a useful tool in dealing with your fellow board members. If I recall correctly, this formulation was first enunciated by my colleague Ivan. 

There are a couple of problems with the current system. 

The first is that everybody has to get 2 hours of training. This requirement was probably intended to prevent elected officials from doing minimal training and thereby avoiding becoming truly educated in what the law demands. 

In practice, the current system of online training could be read and digested in a lot less than the full 2 hours, but the requirement is that you put in 2 hours. So people learn to leave each slide on the screen for a while before clicking to the next slide. That allows you to generate the required onscreen time, even if you are using most of that time to read a novel on the side. 

The training site even hints at this approach, advising us not to hurry. 

It's a big waste of time. 

Since the online training involves verifying your participation by having you complete several question/answer screens, the time rule could be abolished. One time I had to do some online conflict-of-interest training on a federal site. There was no requirement that I spend some specific amount of time, just that I complete the process. California could do the same. 

The other time waster is the requirement that this training be done every 2 years. Repeat training could be accomplished just as effectively by presenting a summary of the rules and requirements, without the extended preachy text and lengthy stories. 

What's worst of all is that the required ethics training avoids the legal, but unethical and immoral, practice of elected office holders, the pursuit of campaign dollars followed by the unofficial repayment of those campaign donations in the form of legislation.

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Follow-up on the NFL and Los Angeles 

Mark Whicker, a Daily Breeze writer, has written a thoughtful piece bearing on the way the NFL and its ancillary organizations behave. 

Tell me again why we need the NFL.

Tell me again why we need to build two billion-dollar stadiums within 20 minutes of each other, when bridges on Interstate 10 are collapsing.

Tell me again why the past 21 years have been so awful, why we’ve been deprived of true sporting entertainment despite the best efforts of the Lakers, Angels, Dodgers, Kings, Ducks, Clippers, Galaxy, USC, UCLA and, for that matter, countless high schools and small colleges.

The NFL is a wonderful and majestic thing from a distance, like a meteor shower. But it becomes harder to separate the suspense of the game from the moral bankruptcy of the league. 

Whicker was writing about the upcoming induction of the late Junior Seau into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. You may remember Seau as the victim of chronic traumatic encephalopathy who took his own life. The problem of CTE is increasingly emerging as a long-term result of head-banging sports. 

Seau's daughter will not be able to speak directly to the audience in presenting her father. The Hall of Fame argues that this is consistent with a rule they have had since 2010, but as Whicker points out, it is also a way for the Hall of Fame, and by extension the culture of professional football, to be able to control the message. No unpleasantness about the increasing evidence of widespread brain injury is going to be welcomed at this event.

 

(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])  

-cw

 

 

CityWatch

Vol 13 Issue 61

Pub: Jul 28, 2015