Nearly a year after he lost the mayor’s race at least in part due to problems his landscaping company had with its city contracts, Councilman Ken Svoboda will cast the deciding vote Monday on whether council members should be allowed to continue doing business with the city.

Svoboda was vacationing last week and missed a council meeting, leading to a deadlocked 3-3 vote on a proposed charter amendment that would ban elected officials and department heads from having city contracts. In order to change the city charter, either the council has to vote to put the issue on the ballot, or a petition drive can do the same.

Svoboda told local radio station KLIN that he will vote no, saying it isn’t necessary to write into the city’s charter.

The proposal infuriated Republicans on the City Council, who claimed it would effectively limit a large pool of business people from running for office. Democrats on the council said people wouldn’t be banned from running, they’d just have to choose between their contracts and public service.

And partisanship raised its ugly head — when Republicans questioned the motives of the Charter Revision Committee that forwarded the proposal by a vote of 14-0, claiming almost all the committee members are Democrats. The committee members were appointed by mayors and confirmed by the City Council.

Victor Covalt, a member of the Charter Revision Committee, questioned whether Councilman Jon Camp should even have voted on the charter amendment last week, since he leases office space to the city.

“I guess I have a problem with it,” Covalt said. “My personal opinion is that he’s in a position where in the past he’s done exactly what this will make unlawful and he has a present contract and he’s standing in the middle of it.”

But the head of the state Accountability and Disclosure Commission, Frank Daley, gave Camp the go-ahead to vote, saying it was unlikely a conflict of interest under state law.

In order to qualify as a conflict of interest, Camp would have to be faced with taking an official action which could result in a financial benefit to himself, Daley said, but the financial effect must be “reasonably foreseeable,” not speculative, contingent or uncertain.

The outcome of a ballot measure is uncertain, Daley said. Thus, his opinion.

Daley said he might have a different opinion if Camp were being asked to vote directly on whether council members should be able to have contracts.

Former City Attorney Bill Austin suggested that very avenue could have been taken, by putting the ban in an ordinance, not the city charter. While testifying against the proposed charter amendment, Austin questioned why the council didn’t just vote on an ordinance change instead of going to the trouble of changing the city’s constitution.

City Attorney Dana Roper said the ban could be enacted by ordinance, but ban proponents thought it would be more permanent if enshrined in the charter.

Covalt, an attorney, doesn’t think an ordinance would work because the city charter legalizes such contracts, and charters govern ordinances.

Since the deadlock will be decided by Svoboda, what’s he likely to do? He isn’t returning phone calls. But with his three Republican colleagues, the chamber, the Lincoln Independent Business Association and home builders all crying foul, it’s doubtful he’ll swim against that tide.

Covalt said the charter committee didn’t expect the “vehement opposition” their proposal received from Republicans and their friends. (Chamber minutes indicate Camp asked the group to come out against the ban.)

“You have to wonder what they’re worried about,” Covalt said, noting that the council has had an ethics code tabled since 2002.

“They’re not that hard to draft,” he said of the tabled ethics code.

Even if Svoboda’s vote kills the legislation, the issue may not die. There’s talk of a petition drive to get the issue on the November ballot, since the deadline to get on the spring ballot has passed.

“I might,” Covalt said of initiating a petition drive. “I’m not precluding myself from doing so.”

Reach Deena Winter at 473-2642 or dwinter@journalstar.com.