Photo by M.V. Jantzen

Phew! It’s been quite the year, huh? In this periodic end-of-the-year series, we look at the people and places that made 2011 what it was. In this installment, it’s SUVs and CSFs.

When the City Paper first reported in late January on two city-leased luxury sports utility vehicles used by Mayor Vince Gray and D.C. Council Chair Kwame Brown, at most it would look like the two were a little out of touch—at the time, the District was facing a budget deficit north of $500 million, after all.

But within a few weeks Gray would be embroiled in the Sulaimon Brown scandal, making the issue of an SUV seem insignificant by comparison. For Brown, though, the decked-out Lincoln Navigator would prove to be a quick undoing of what seemed like a promising climb up the city’s political ladder.

What made the entire controversy so galling was not only that Brown requested and got the now infamous “fully loaded” SUV, but rather that he was so intimately involved in choosing everything from the color of the interior leather to the entertainment center. And when he didn’t get exactly what he wanted, he just got another SUV, leaving taxpayers to cover the cost of briefly leasing both. (The one he had settled on would have run $1,900 a month, had he kept it.) A later investigation found that the problem wasn’t only limited to Brown, though—plenty of other SUVs were being leased against city rules.

The SUV proved to be only the tip of an iceberg, the majority of which was hidden from view but quickly emerged to expose all sorts of dubiously ethical behavior by elected officials that is only now resulting in comprehensive ethics legislation—which, critics say, doesn’t do enough to address the worst of the city’s ethical rot.

In April, an audit by the D.C. Office of Campaign Finance found that Brown had steered hundreds of thousands of dollars of 2008 campaign funds to a firm operated by his brother. (The issue is still being investigated by the feds.) Both Councilmembers Yvette Alexander (D-Ward 7) and Jack Evans came under fire for questionable use of their Constituent Services Funds, while Councilmember Michael Brown (I-At Large) was criticized for what some said was a sneaky move to insert Internet gambling into a budget bill and Councilmember Jim Graham (D-Ward 1) was handed an envelope full of cash that he rejected—but also failed to report.

Of course, none of those unethical dalliances compared to what Councilmember Harry Thomas, Jr. (D-Ward 5) was accused of in June—steering $300,000 in city funds to not-so-city uses. And while he remains steadfast in claiming that he’s innocent, in July he went ahead and settled with the city, agreeing to pay back the money he was said to have taken.

All told, things reached such a low point during the summer months that we almost reached a council majority on at least one thing—questionable conduct. As in a lot of them were involved in shenanigans of various shades.

In recent months the council has been on something of a soul-searching mission, working its way through legislation proposed by Councilmember Muriel Bowser (D-Ward 4) that would create a new ethics police and stiffen up some penalties.

But if making laws is no better than making sausages, this is some low-quality sausage, according to some critics of the bill, which passed on a second vote on December 20. It doesn’t do anything about the bundling of campaign contributions and only slightly limits contributions to CSFs, instead of getting rid of them altogether. Coupled with the silence of the majority of the council on Thomas’ fate, good government advocates just don’t think anyone’s really taking ethics seriously.

The fundraising process for the 2012 election seems to bear that out. There’s not only plenty of campaign contribution bundling going on, but corporate contributions are just about on par with individual contributions. (Even worse, there seem to be fewer and fewer small donors.) And, if anything else was needed to prove a point, councilmembers were allowed to used money from their CSFs for—get this—their holiday party.

But just as the year’s ethics morass started with an SUV, it also somewhat came to a close with an SUV. As federal agents searched Thomas’ house on a sunny Friday in early December, they removed bags of paper and two vehicles—a motorcycle and an SUV.