Hors D'oeurvres and a Bud
Metro Council on the Take?
I like Chris Ferrell. The second term at-large Metro Council member is a thoughtful progressive who works hard and seems genuinely engaged in doing the hard and sometimes tedious work of local government. Perhaps a tad overconsumed at times with the city’s power to regulate adult establishments, but on balance one of Metro’s bright lights in public office. (Necessary disclosure: I made a contribution to his re-election campaign last year.)
If that sounds like the polite preamble to an impending slam – well, no, it’s not a slam, but I do come bearing disappointment and chagrin. My hope is that Ferrell and many of his colleagues on the council will see through to righting a wrong that is of their own making, and within their own power to rectify.
The subject is ethics, and the stakes are integrity and public trust. An invitation from Tennessee Titans Owner Bud Adams to Metro Council members for an afternoon of NFL skybox luxury was too much to resist for Ferrell and 18 or so of his colleagues. A few citizen complaints have roused the city’s dormant public ethics review machinery – the Metro Board of Ethical Conduct – to look into the matter.
Chris Ferrell is the one council member who is part of that ethics panel. Its voting members are all citizens outside of government (more necessary disclosure: I am married to one of them), but the ordinance that created the board also calls for the council’s president pro tem to serve ex officio as a nonvoting member – and that’s Ferrell.
So it’s no surprise that when The Tennessean reported last week that the ethics board would receive these complaints and fire up its process of inquiry, the paper sought out Ferrell for comment. Described in the story as seeing no ethical violation, Ferrell was quoted with this explanation: "Council members get invited to attend a lot of functions all over the city, from bean suppers to company Christmas parties. The scale differs, but the theory doesn’t differ much from what most organizations in the city do when they want to meet with members of Metro Council."
Before we deconstruct this bit of Orwellian political philosophy, a quick digression into the merits of its even seeing the light of day. Ferrell, as part of the ethics panel, should certainly know better than to speak publicly on the merits of a charge that has not yet been taken up by the body legally invested with the responsibility for examining it. As with any formal or informal process of adjudication, his credibility as an impartial participant is immediately and hopelessly compromised. Moreover, as the sole elected official on a panel of citizens outside government, Ferrell’s advantage in knowledge of council processes might lead him (intentionally or not) to wield disproportionate influence over the ethics board and its members.
And let’s not forget this little detail: Ferrell cannot be an impartial participant in the ethics board’s proceedings because he is one of the "accused" here. The law that formed the ethics panel puts Ferrell on it because of the Metro Council leadership position he occupies, but this is a case in which his participation is flatly inappropriate. He should have told reporters he is recusing himself from the panel for this issue, and perhaps named a substitute from among the several council members who managed to resist Bud’s wily skyboxian charms.
But he did open his mouth, so what of Ferrell’s palliation on the ethics charge itself? He argues "the scale" may differ but it’s all OK because it’s what "organizations" do when they want to meet council members. I’m pretty comfortable with Ferrell’s political instincts, but this is as zany a theory of ethics in public life as you’ll hear this side of 1972. Two big problems here.
First, "organizations" don’t meet council members. People do – people with political and financial interests in how the city and the council do business. And they don’t seek to "meet" council members because they want to expand their circle of friends; they build relationships to serve present and future interests. This doesn’t mean, of course, that elected officials should shun opportunities to mingle with constituents in and out of organizations. But it is incumbent on office holders to do so with eyes open about not-so-hidden agendas. In this case, the Titans are far and away the largest beneficiary of Metro corporate welfare largesse; the absence of currently pending legislation regarding the business they do with and within the city in no way diminishes the need for strictly arms length relationships between Titan’s management and elected officials.
Second, "scale" is everything in potential conflicts of interest, with the risk of taint unmistakably tied to the magnitude of the gift or favor or consideration that a public official is willing to accept from a stakeholder in public policy. Corporations and governmental units all the time adopt ethics codes that draw these difficult lines – sometimes taking an absolutist position that puts even trivial exchanges out of bounds, and other times crafting distinctions between trivial sources of conflict and those that are substantially corrupting. But a code of ethics worth its salt would never use the trivial to justify the egregious, as Ferrell did with his dismissive assessment.
Chris Ferrell knows better, and is smart enough to do the right thing right now. He should remove himself from the Metro Board of Ethical Conduct for the duration of this inquiry, and tell the community that he was wrong to color the panel’s inquiry with public statements about whether the charges have merit. These are not the trivial gripes of frustrated stadium opponents; these are legitimate conflict of interest allegations that deserve proper scrutiny from the panel created by Metro Council for precisely this purpose.
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