Better Late Than Never: Miami Pols Embrace Ethics
Surprise! City of Miami Commissioners are on board with ethics classes
By HANK TESTER
Updated 7:06 PM EDT, Thu, Dec 10, 2009
Miami is going to "Ethics School." The city's fearless leaders and their bureaucrats will soon be learning about truth, integrity, ethics, dignity, decency and respect.
It's all part of a new program from Mayor Tomas Regalado and Commissioner Marc Sarnoff, and unveiled today.
The brand new Mayor and his Commissioner sidekick say they cooked up the ethics legislation well before Commissioners Michelle Spence-Jones and Angel Gonzalez were drummed out of office. Spence-Jones is answering charges of diverting public funds to her family, and Gonzalez for hustling a no-show job for his daughter from a contractor who did business with the city.
Not only will the city leaders and officials have to take the ethics classes, so will lobbyists who can't ply their trade until they put in classroom time.
They just now got it up for a vote.
Commissioner Sarnoff and Mayor Regalado, who head up the "new look" City Hall, say there will be no more excuses for those who sign off on documents which indicate the coursework has been completed.
"It was to stop an excuse and more times than not you will hear people say 'I just did not know and it did not seem wrong to me'," Sarnoff said. The Mayor repeated over and over that, "transparency will be the theme of this administration in the next years."
Even Spence-Jones, who despite her legal trouble is running to reclaim her old seat, said "All elected officials should go through a course on ethics."
Dario Mareno, an FIU political scientist who will teach the ethics classes, says that the ordinance is a symbolic first step in rooting out corruption. "The city realizes it has a problem it is trying to deal with and it no longer has its head buried in the sand," Mareno said.
Over the years the City of Miami has seen City Managers and Commissioners go to jail on a variety of corruption and voter fraud charges. The fall of Angel Gonzalez and Michelle Spence-Jones continued a tradition that this crop of commissioners and mayor claim they want to snuff out. We will be watching.
Hank Tester has been covering news and politics in South Florida since 1992.
First Published: Dec 10, 2009 4:48 PM EDT
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