Ethics

IT IS DISAPPOINTING to see the city's Board of Ethics undermine its own reputation for solid work by its adoption of the ethical stinkbomb called the DROP program. Evan Meyer, general counsel for the Board of Ethics, signed up for the city's Deferred Retirement Option Plan, which meant that in exchange for agreeing to retire by a certain date, he would get a special payment of some of his pension benefits in a lump sum. Meyer was allowed to take advantage of the program's most unseemly loophole by retiring for a day in order to collect the lump sum, and then getting hired back at his former salary.

HERE IS our handy Daily News ballot you can take to the polls . . . oops, the primary was last week wasn't it? Today, there is a vote that will have a bigger impact on the city than a new slate of judicial candiates: the vote in City Council on a significant ethics reform bill. This bill changes how no-bid contracts are awarded and may be voted on by Council today. A slew of other ethics bills are currently in committee, and all could be voted on before Council recesses in June.

In your June 22 article on surrogate mothers, research on embryos (unborn human beings), and related issues, Dr. Michael Birnbaum is quoted as saying, "The ethical questions are always there, but the minute we stop doing something because of ethics, we stop going forward and start going backward. " He seems to be saying that if scientists possess the knowledge and ability to perform a given act, they should do it regardless of the consequences. This is precisely the attitude that disturbs many people, including me. The divorce of ethical considerations from science can only result in the most horrible abuses of human rights.

There are two kinds of responsibility. There is moral responsibility, powerful and immutable. And legal responsibility, which is negotiable. There are also two kinds of ethics. There are moral ethics, which are grounded solidly, and legal ethics, subject to the kind of interpretation that would make an eastern European figure skating judge blanch. For instance, NBC-TV was morally irresponsible when it put igniters in a truck for a show on General Motors' pickup trucks, which seem to have a disquieting tendency to blow up. It was ethically dubious as well, so NBC fired a bunch of people, fell all over itself apologizing and replaced its news boss.

Paul Contillo's home town of Paramus in Bergen County was a boom town during the 1970s, and in the rush to build shopping centers and other developments, Contillo saw some troubling things in municipal government. "We had tremendous pressure on the planning board and the board of adjustment for considerations for developers, and the boards were filled with insurance adjustors and plumbers and people like that," recalled Contillo, then a Paramus councilman and now a Democratic state senator.

Mayor Nutter yesterday announced the creation of a task force that will study fixes to be made to the city's five-year-old campaign-finance law, and review city ethics policies as well. "I campaigned on a promise to clean up city government and to restore citizens' faith in City Hall - this is one more fulfillment of that promise," Nutter said in a statement. Even so, hours later the city's leading government watchdog group, the Committee of Seventy, expressed disappointment that the task force's work would not likely be completed in time to affect two significant races - for city controller and district attorney in November 2009.

TODAY, WITH ALL eyes fixed on the budget, Council could move to pass a package of "ethics" bills, not all of which are especially ethical. One part of the package, a proposal to require lobbyists to register with the city and disclose their activities, is a good idea. Unfortunately, it's lumped together with another bill that would lift a longstanding ban on political activity by city employees. This would depend on public approval of a charter change that would give Council authority to set political-activity rules by ordinance, rather than seeking voter approval.

We have a problem in this country with what our President might call "the ethics thing. " We have also been made aware in recent years that we have a massive problem in our school systems. Let us call this second problem, just to keep things neat, a matter of "this thinking thing. " The graduates of our schools - even our elite business and professional schools - don't seem to be very good at solving ethical or moral problems. And the graduates of all our schools - but especially our public secondary schools - don't seem to be very good at any kind of thinking.

The Haverford Township Board of Commissioners has pledged to adopt a code of ethics, but has not determined a method or time by which it will do so. Unanimous approval of the intention came Monday night after the board rejected, by the surprisingly close vote of 5-4, a specific code proposed by Commissioner Ben Kapustin. In most cases, a proposal by the board's lone Democrat would have been soundly defeated. Kapustin first offered his code six months ago. In the face of indifference and hostility from other board members, he dropped the plan until two weeks ago, when the proposed code came under heavy criticism.

Steal a million, serve a year: What's the price of investment fraud? If you are caught and convicted, count on being sentenced to about a year in prison for every $1 million you wrongly separated from clients, according to a Main Line ethicist's survey of a dozen local pyramid schemers jailed since Wall Street mega-fraudster Bernard Madoff got sent away in 2009. "There is a consistent standard," yet results vary with public outrage and other factors, says Julie Anne Ragatz, director of the Cary M. Maguire Center for Ethics in Financial Services at American College, the insurance and investment school in Bryn Mawr.

Nearly two years after City Council and Mayor Nutter approved an ordinance requiring lobbyists to register and disclose their expenses, there's still no computer software to make the program work the way it was intended. The city Board of Ethics and the Nutter administration's technology chief, Abel Ebeid, say that Perficient Inc., a St. Louis firm, was unable to deliver on a $227,000 contract to handle lobbyist registration and disclosure statements and put the information on a public city website.

City Councilwoman Jannie L. Blackwell has agreed to pay $3,250 in fines for accepting four campaign donations last year that exceeded the city's contribution limits. The city Board of Ethics disclosed the fines Wednesday, one of five settlement agreements involving violations of the contribution ceilings. During last year's elections, candidates were allowed to accept no more than $2,600 from individuals or $10,600 from political action committees. Blackwell acknowledged receipts totaling $12,500 from the Laborer's District Council PAC and $12,000 from the Genesis IV PAC, run by Edgar C. Campbell Jr., a Democratic ward leader in West Philadelphia.

After my column ran last Thursday about the latest victims of Philadelphia parking outrages, I got a call telling me to check out a tweet from Mark McDonald, the mayor's press secretary. At 2:55 p.m. that day, here's what McDonald sent out to his 1,006 Twitter followers: "If reporter has let's say 150 agency violations, do you disclose that as you time after time pound said agency with your commentary?" What the heck? That morning, I had published, for the 14th time in nine months, a column about the crazy treatment of some unlucky drivers by employees of the Philadelphia Parking Authority and its sister agency, the Bureau of Administrative Adjudication (BAA)

Starting a program with Pierre Boulez, that paragon of cerebral modernism, and ending it with Balinese ensembles and dancers is your basic day at the office for Orchestra 2001, the Swarthmore-based modern-music ensemble that shrinks from little. The unexpected part of Saturday's concert at the Philadelphia Ethical Society was when these disparate elements melded, seemingly by accident, and then, amid better-laid plans, did not. Boulez was represented with 1984's Derive I, a 10-minute chamber piece for winds, strings, and percussion that, we can see in hindsight, is an instance of seemingly repressive systematization yielding something that sounds like complete musical freedom.

TUESDAY, the city's Board of Ethics went before City Council in the annual budget beg-a-thon. Although this is an annual rite of passage for every city department, we hope that Council considers the board's plea for an additional $120,000. That would inch the board's budget to just above $1 million. (As a point of comparison, the Council's own budget is $15 million, and it doesn't have to answer any questions about how the money's spent.) Considering the work of the Ethics Board, especially since it was revitalized in 2008, after a tepid reconstitution under Mayor John Street, it's one department of the city whose positive impact is undeniable.

It's hard to imagine that the graceful, understated jewelry that Anna Bario and Page Neal fabricate was once produced in a tiny, grimy studio at Ninth and Spring Garden. "When we see customers who knew us then, it's like seeing your family?…," says Bario. "?‘I was 25 and working in a dirty studio across from a pistol range, and somehow you believed in us.'?" Now, the duo craft their wares in a sunny Queen Village shop with gray-painted hardwood floors and a pressed-tin ceiling — more apropos of their personal and professional aesthetic.

WASHINGTON - Sen. David Vitter undermined public trust when he blocked a raise for Interior Secretary Ken Salazar unless he issued more deep-water exploratory drilling permits in the Gulf of Mexico after the BP oil spill, the Senate ethics committee said in a letter released Friday. The committee called the Louisiana Republican's actions unprecedented but spared him charges of rules violations. In a statement Friday, Vitter said that the committee had validated his action by dismissing the complaint and that he was glad he had "killed Ken Salazar's salary increase - he has completely failed us on energy policy.

A work-around that has allowed some City Controller's employees to avoid city ethics rules is officially a thing of the past. For decades, a small number of workers in the Controller's Office have not been subject to a city ban on political activity because they were on the School District payroll. But Board of Ethics Executive Director Shane Creamer on Thursday released an opinion from City Solicitor Shelley Smith that said those workers should be subject to the same rules as other city employees.

AWORKAROUND that has allowed some employees of the City Controller's Office to avoid city ethics rules is officially a thing of the past. For decades, a few workers in the Controller's Office have not been subject to a city ban on political activity because they were on the school-district payroll. But the Board of Ethics' executive director, Shane Creamer, on Thursday released an opinion from City Solicitor Shelley Smith that said that those workers should be subject to the same rules as other city employees.