This is how it happens.
First comes the government scandal.
An official, or group of officials, perhaps elected, sometimes not, get caught with their hands in the cookie jar, allowing private businesses seeking government contracts to influence their official decisions.
Then comes the investigation, maybe even an indictment or two. The unethical officials resign or are drummed out of office.
Then comes the cleanup. New government officials promise a new way of business.
But wait, say the business leaders. Beware the unintended consequences. Reform is hard. Slow down.
Time passes. Memories fade. And the government ends up back at square one.
Such must be the fear with the recent tapping of the brakes on the attempts to reform St. Louis County government after the corruption scandal of former County Executive Steve Stenger spurred a series of proposals to protect taxpayers from unabated greed.
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Last week, the County Council tabled a proposal pushed by new County Executive Sam Page to institute a ban on communication with vendors during a competitive bid process. The slowdown came after testimony from a lobbyist that said Page’s proposed “cone of silence†might lead to confusion.
Indeed, it is common during bidding processes for companies to have regular contact with the bureaucrats issuing the bid, to get updates and negotiate changes. The give and take works both ways. But that doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be an effective way to limit such contact and make it more transparent.
The task now is to make the proposal better, not let it fall through the cracks, lest the county repeat the failures of similar efforts in the past.
Take the Missouri Housing Development Commission. In 2007 the state agency that delivers lucrative tax credits to developers in Missouri discussed a stringent new ethics policy following disclosure of a questionable land deal between one of the commissioners and a key developer. But it fell by the wayside. Three years later, as that agency’s director resigned amid an FBI investigation, commissioners proposed a new ethics rule similar to what is being proposed in St. Louis County.
That proposal called for requiring developers to disclose all of their political donations to the housing commissioners at the time they apply for tax credits. Developers complained that it would be too complicated.
The proposal was tabled and died on the vine.
That same year, Missouri lawmakers were busy crafting their own ethics proposal following the indictments of a couple of former members of the Legislature on corruption charges. All year long they crafted what was for the most part a serious proposal. In the end, House and Senate leaders whittled it down to just a few changes in ethics law, including a provision that was intended to avoid the sort of campaign money laundering that several years later Stenger employed.
The law was tossed by the courts after a business group sued over that provision.
Indeed, crafting ethics laws that work and avoid unintended consequences can be a difficult process. More often than not, the biggest difficulty is overcoming the fact that sometimes, even the reformers have benefited from some of the same schemes they are working to outlaw.
That seems to be the case in the office of Gov. Mike Parson, who in 2018 replaced disgraced former Gov. Eric Greitens amid multiple investigations into Greitens’ various ethical lapses. One of those investigations involved the use of text-destroying software called “Confide†that made it next to impossible to follow the state’s open records law.
Mark Pedroli, the lawyer who filed a lawsuit against Greitens over his use of Confide, is now pressing Parson’s office over the use of similar phone apps, and he’s running into a brick wall just trying to verify whether the governor’s office is using them.
How quickly we forget the grand pronouncements by former Attorney General Josh Hawley (whose office also used such apps) that the government should not be in the business of using software that destroys public documents before they can be preserved.
Last week, the same week that the County Council tabled the vendor communication bill, the man who spurred the need for it, began his four-year prison stint in Yankton, South Dakota.
He is gone, but should not be forgotten, not when there’s still important work to do to clean up the mess he left behind.