The issue of whether elected city officials should be allowed to have city contracts prompted a long, hot debate at the City Council on Monday.
DEENA WINTER /Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Monday, March 3, 2008 6:00 pm
The issue of whether elected city officials should be allowed to have city contracts prompted a long, hot debate at the City Council Monday and exposed a partisan divide that occasionally surfaces on the officially nonpartisan council.
The three Republicans present for the meeting and the council’s three Democrats saw the proposed charter amendment very differently: The Republicans saw it as an assault on business people that would prevent them and their employees from running for office (or force them to drop city contracts). The Democrats saw it as a sorely needed ban that voters have a right to weigh in on. Voters must approve charter changes.
With Republican Councilman Ken Svoboda absent, the council deadlocked 3-3, meaning the issue will be voted on at the council’s next meeting. Mayor Chris Beutler, a Democrat, supports putting the issue on the ballot.
The issue came before the City Council on the unanimous recommendation of the Charter Revision Committee. Specifically, the proposal would ban elected officials and department heads from contracting with the city, individually or through a business in which they have a direct or indirect ownership interest.
Currently, council members are allowed to have contracts with the city, although they can’t vote on them.
Two council members’ contracts prompted the debate.
Svoboda’s family-owned landscaping company has had multiple city contracts up until last year, when Svoboda dropped them to run for mayor. The company’s performance problems became fodder during the mayoral campaign.
Svoboda’s contract also became fodder for Monday’s debate, with opponents of the ban suggesting the problem wasn’t the contract but the performance, and ban supporters saying the contract shouldn’t have existed.
It got personal: Councilwoman Robin Eschliman said the proposed ban was a “slap in the face of business” and suggested the committee’s real motivation was to stop business people from running for office.
It got partisan: Councilman John Spatz questioned whether the Charter Revision Committee was truly representative of the community. Dallas Jones, chairman of the Lancaster County Republican Party, went a step further, suggesting the committee was politically motivated, because 13 of the 15 members are Democrats.
Councilman Jon Camp barely spoke: He leases office space to the Urban Development Department in the Haymarket District.
Kathleen Neary, who serves on the volunteer charter committee, said after all the debate that she felt her own integrity had been questioned.
Supporters of the ban noted that business-friendly Omaha has an even tougher ban, which prohibits all city employees from contracting with the city. Eschliman said Omaha has a much bigger population, with more people to run for office and businesses to contract with.
Councilman Jonathan Cook said it’s not a good situation for a mayor to have to deal with a council member’s performance problems — as both former Mayor Coleen Seng and then Beutler did with Svoboda’s contracts.
Former City Attorney Bill Austin said a similar situation occurs when a police officer stops the mayor for speeding, or a council member doesn’t pay his water bill. Cook said that’s a little different from a person voluntarily deciding to run for office or seek a contract.
The chamber of commerce and Lincoln Independent Business Association opposed the proposal, saying it could prevent good business people from running for office and prevent the city from getting the lowest or best bids.
LIBA head Coby Mach called the ban “perhaps the most anti-business piece of legislation to ever come before this City Council” and said it would have done nothing to prevent “the worst contracting problem this city has ever faced” — the botched purchase of seven firetrucks.
He waved 106 pages of city contracts with businesses whose employees would not be able to run for office without the contracts ending. But a mayoral aide —who is privy to all kinds of inside information — could hold a contract, he noted.
While Spatz said state law already adequately handles potential conflicts of interest, Jack Gould of Common Cause Nebraska said the law is “extremely weak” and needs strengthening.
“Let the public vote on this issue,” Gould said. “They’re not stupid.”
Vic Covalt, who also served on the charter committee, said the argument that the pool of people who could run for office would be diminished was a “red herring.”
“Are you afraid that the people of the city might agree with us?” he asked the council. “You should not be on both sides of a contract. … If Mr. Svoboda would have been elected mayor, he would have had to fire himself.”
But Spatz said Svoboda did pay a price for the contract problems — “The way I remember it, Ken lost,” he said.
Eschliman suggested supporters of the ban were saying business people are so unethical they couldn’t both have a contract and serve. She ticked off some of the words and phrases supporters of the ban had used — corruption, self-dealing, unethical, fox in the henhouse — and suggested they were characterizations of business people.
And with that, the three Democrats on the council voted to put the issue on a ballot, and the three Republicans voted “no.”
Reach Deena Winter at 473-2642 or dwinter@journalstar.com.