[EL] DC corruption and disclosure/intimidation

[Robert Wechsler]

Transparency with respect to campaign contributions, or any gifts to 
officials or prospective officials, has one serious unintended 
consequence:  it makes it difficult for an individual to support a 
candidate or official when this might cause another candidate or 
official to retaliate against him.

What the individual risks losing does not have to be as serious and 
direct as a city contract or job. An individual may worry about losing 
business from those supporting other candidates (usually the incumbent) 
or, where the local government has a very poor ethics environment, from 
losing business altogether, especially when the individual is a lawyer, 
realtor, or other local service provider. And the individual doesn't 
have to own the business that may be harmed. An employee will have the 
same concerns.

This unintended consequence only exists where there is fear of 
retaliation, and this fear exists only in a poor ethics environment. A 
contractor should not believe that he has to give thousands, not to 
mention hundreds of thousands, of dollars to ensure he keeps or 
increases the amount of his contracts. Whenever the fear of retaliation 
is expressed (privately; such fears are almost never expressed publicly) 
by more than a few people (not including the overly wary or people 
looking for an excuse to hold on to their money), there is probably a 
poor ethics environment. The problem is not the transparency, but the 
ethics environment and those who created it or who allow it to continue.

It is no surprise that the campaign chair for the former mayor (the one 
defeated by the current mayor) is now saying that the allegations bring 
into question the legitimacy of the current mayor's administration. Of 
course, the contractor may not really have been afraid of retaliation, 
but just using this as an excuse to hide his decision to cover all the 
angles. But there are few that seem to feel that the D.C. government's 
ethics environment has been very healthy.

Instead of talking about the problem of transparency with respect to 
campaign contributions and other gifts, we should focus our discussion 
on ethics environments and the problem of fear of retaliation. This is a 
legitimate topic for discussion and public hearings by an ethics 
commission. A big scandal should not be required to have this discussion.

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research
City Ethics, Inc.
rwechsler at cityethics.org
203-230-2548