Irv Nathan

Earlier this year, D.C. Council Chair Kwame Brown announced that professors and graduate students at Georgetown University’s Public Policy Institute would help him draft legislation strengthening the District’s weak ethics rules. While Brown was seemingly impressed enough with their work to grant them a ceremonial resolution and craft legislation around their ideas, not many other people seem to share those sentiments.

During a D.C. Council hearing today, D.C. Attorney General Irv Nathan and other witnesses largely dismissed the central components of the Comprehensive Ethics Reform Act sponsored by Brown and Councilmember Mary Cheh (D-Ward 3) as exceedingly bureaucratic and largely ineffective. Nathan called the creation of a new Office of Government Accountability a “duplicative bureaucracy” that would “divert energy and resources” from existing D.C. agencies and offices tasked with policing and enforcing ethics rules for government employees. (One good government group had already called the legislation “toothless.”)

“Improve the current system, don’t add a new layer to it,” Nathan told Cheh and Brown during a hearing that included testimony from officials from the Office of Campaign Finance, D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics and watchdog organizations. Speaking on behalf of the election board, Counsel Kenneth McGhee similarly worried that with OCF and BOEE facing budget cuts, a new office would be hard-pressed to find the money to survive in the District’s tough fiscal climate.

A number of councilmembers attended the hearing, but few of them seemed to hint that Cheh and Brown’s proposal would get very far. Councilmember Vincent Orange (D-At Large) even said that he would be introducing competing legislation, and a number of his colleagues seemed willing to vest more authority in the Office of the Attorney General to investigate and prosecute ethical transgressions. Councilmember Tommy Wells (D-Ward 6) worried that Cheh and Brown’s bill didn’t go far enough because it wouldn’t make any changes to existing campaign finance rules, notably those governing disclosure requirements for transition and inaugural committees. (Currently, disclosure is essentially optional.)

Regardless of what proposal eventually wins the Council’s support, it likely won’t move quickly, despite the ongoing scandals in the Wilson Building. Cheh said that she didn’t think a vote would be scheduled before the legislature’s summer recess, pushing enactment of any comprehensive legislation to late 2011, or even early 2012. That didn’t seem to bother some witnesses, though, who pushed for the entire proposal to be scrapped and for the Council to start over.

Dorothy Brizill, executive director of D.C. Watch and longtime good government advocate, argued that Cheh and Brown should talk to national experts on ethics and put forth a new and improved proposal. She also argued that regardless of what’s passed, residents have to know that the city’s laws count for something.

“Citizens need to believe that there are going to be ethics laws on the books that are going to be enforced,” she said.