10:00 PM PDT on Wednesday, September 1, 2010

By ALICIA ROBINSON
The Press-Enterprise

Riverside council members will consider appointing a panel of citizens to thoroughly evaluate the ethics code and recommend changes, the council’s governmental affairs committee decided Wednesday.

The committee rejected three other suggestions for code changes — two of which residents have made repeatedly — at an annual ethics code review. The discarded ideas had to do with when the ethics code applies, to whom it applies and how ethics complaints are addressed.

Some residents at the meeting were vocal about their feeling that committee members — councilmen Steve Adams, William “Rusty” Bailey and Andy Melendrez — were passing the buck rather than listening to the residents’ ideas.

The full council will decide Sept. 21 whether to form a special panel to look at the ethics code, which would be a shift in procedure. Since the code was written in 2005, changes to the code have been suggested by the governmental affairs committee and then voted on by the council.

“I’m very disappointed that today you’re putting everything on the council,” said Jennifer Vaughn-Blakely, who leads a community issues forum called The Group and headed the committee that wrote the ethics code.

“What it now has been made to look like is we’re a bunch of disgruntled gadflies who are showing up to complain.”

She asked, as she has for several years, that ethics complaints be heard by an independent panel. Council members didn’t support that idea. As the code is now written, a committee of the mayor and three council members hears complaints.

Of the 10 complaints ever filed, five were made in the past year. Two of the 10 complaints reached the hearing stage but were judged to be unfounded; most others were considered outside the scope of the code or were resolved in other ways; and one complaint filed Monday against Adams has not been set for a hearing.

Tom Schultz, a retired educator and 54-year city resident, said having council members decide ethics issues about their colleagues is “putting the fox in charge of the henhouse.”

“When government officials try to police themselves, it doesn’t work,” Schultz said.

The code outlines values for elected officials and appointed board and commission members, such as creating a government that citizens trust, making unbiased and fair decisions, and using their offices to serve the public rather than for personal gain.

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