Wichita City Council plans to tackle ethics reform following Clendenin resignation

When Mayor Brandon Whipple was elected, he promised sweeping ethics reform at City Hall after an Eagle investigation last fall showed massive holes in Wichita’s City Council ethics policy, including no limits on gifts and no penalties for violations.

The call for change came after Whipple’s predecessor, Jeff Longwell, steered a $500 million contract for a new water treatment plant away from one of the top engineering firms in the country and to a local group that included his friends and political supporters.

Since then, Whipple says the need for ethics reform has grown following the resignation of former City Council member James Clendenin, who stepped down on Dec. 31 amid ouster proceedings for his role in a smear campaign against Whipple.

“There’s no shortage of examples of bad behavior by elected officials in Wichita,” Whipple said. “And it’s really time to change the culture. We want to go from, frankly, one of the worst ethics policies in the country to one of the best.”

By the end of January, a new ethics policy proposal will go before the council for discussion. It will include new rules for conflicts of interest and clearer definitions of appropriate relationships between council members and those doing business with the city. It will also place a limit on gifts council members can receive from businesses, organizations and individuals, Whipple said.

Whipple said he’s optimistic that a new policy can help to codify the ethical expectations for elected city leaders and empower an independent board to conduct investigations and levy penalties for breaking the rules.

“It can’t make things worse,” he said. “As we’ve seen over the last few months with our current ethics policy that really doesn’t have any teeth.”

The City Council censured Clendenin in late October for his role in a plot to falsely accuse Whipple of sexual harassment and then try to shift the blame to local Republican Party leaders when the smear campaign backfired during the 2019 mayoral race. Censuring Clendenin for a breach of the ethical code was the most severe punishment available to the council at the time.

Whipple said the new policy should empower the city to discipline the mayor and council members for ethical violations. It will also establish a whistleblower hotline for city employees and residents to report behavior by council members to the ethics board.

“What we have right now in the draft policy is really three parts: a list of tenets council members must abide by, a board that can have an independent investigation and then hold accountable elected officials who violate one of those tenets, and this group will be able to issue a fine,” Whipple said.

The board’s activities and penalties will be public and must uphold the due process rights of council members, he said.

“In public, of course, all of this is going to be done in public,” he said. “The public aspect is vitally important because it deters unethical behavior along with the fine.”

The new policy as described by Whipple would be a massive shift from the loose and unenforceable policy the City Council has now.

For example, Wichita City Council members are allowed to accept unlimited gifts and don’t have to report them to the public unless they’re worth $500 or more. If undisclosed gifts are discovered, often the only punishment is correcting paperwork.

Such was the case when the Eagle uncovered gifts in the form of golf outings and meals from contractors to Whipple’s predecessor, Jeff Longwell, during the bidding process for the Northwest Water Treatment facility. Longwell defended his actions, saying the contractors were his friends.

Current policy forbids council members from voting on matters involving friends without defining the term. The current policy allows the council members to police themselves, and in Longwell’s case, they took no action. They defended him in public, saying it is important for elected officials to build relationships with local business leaders.

But behind the scenes, Wichita city officials acknowledged the weaknesses of the policy and began working to change it as early as December 2019, a memorandum provided by the city shows.

“It is a piecemeal approach to ethics in government with only one piece,” City Attorney Jennifer Magana wrote in a memo to City Manager Robert Layton on December 20, 2019.

Magana said the City Council’s ethics policy “is generally an aspirational policy statement, which provides no penalties or process for enforcement. It lacks definitions of key terms, a complaint and/or investigation process, and leaves interpretation up to the Council itself.”

The council was poised to take up the issue in 2020, Whipple said, but the coronavirus pandemic slowed the process. The council held one workshop on ethics last year.

Layton says city staff, Whipple and the rest of the council have been working on a draft of a new policy for several months. A proposal will be presented during a workshop on January 26, he said.

Council members support change

Vice Mayor Cindy Claycomb said the past year and a half — when controversies surrounding Longwell, Clendenin and other local officials dominated headlines — convinced her that the city needs to make some changes.

“While I make decisions for the good of District 6 and the City of Wichita based on my own integrity, the last year and a half has indicated to me that there are other elected officials that need more structure in an Ethics Policy,” Claycomb said.

Claycomb said she’s “open to exploring changes to the current Ethics Policy that may help avoid the issues we have seen in the last year and a half.”

City Council member Jeff Blubaugh said he supports changing the ethics policy, if the changes actually ensure transparency and public trust.

“The intent should not be to play ‘political’ games as we have seen over the last several months,” Blubaugh said in an email. “I want to see the focus of our City to be moving our city forward through the challenges with Covid, our local economy and ensuring public safety.”

One change Blubaugh would like to see in the new ethics policy is a statement against online bullying, he said.

“I have requested we add language about Cyber Bullying similar to what you see in our local schools,” he said. “Public officials or their agents shouldn’t be participating in cyber bullying whether it be through text, email or social media.

“We are seeing more and more picture and video manipulation making its rounds on social media that serve as nothing more than smear campaigns,” Blubaugh said. “The focus of the council needs to be moving the city forward as leaders and not playing immature political games.”

City Council members Bryan Frye and Becky Tuttle declined to discuss any specifics.

“While I appreciate the work of the media, this is a policy discussion where the next step is a council workshop,” Frye said in an email. “I prefer to have open dialogue with my peers & the public and not try to influence outcomes in the press.”

Tuttle said the Wichita City Council and Mayor have been drafting an ethics policy for the past several months and that she’s confident it will yield an “extremely strong” ethics policy.

“It is important that the next step in the process be open, honest, and transparent conversations among the Council and to seek constituent input,” Tuttle said. “I appreciate The Wichita Eagle’s interest and it is important for residents to stay informed that these conversations are occurring. We will continue to have a public process at the City Council Workshop on January 26th and it would not be as transparent to negotiate important public policy decisions through the media.”

City Council member Brandon Johnson said he supports changes that “modernize and improve” the existing policy.

“Our current policy had no real enforcement mechanism and in some ways was vague,” Johnson said.

“I look forward to working with my colleagues this month on improvements and hearing from Wichitans what they think about will be proposed and if it meets their expectations of what elected officials should abide by,” he said.

What’s missing

While the proposed ethics policy would signal a change at City Hall, it likely won’t change City Council members’ existing entanglements.

It would, however, provide clearer guidance on what types of relationships are appropriate and which ones pose potential conflicts of interest and require disclosure, Whipple said.

In its current form, the new ethics policy would not have any language forbidding council members from awarding city contracts or city incentives to campaign donors. But it would disallow favorable treatment based on political donations, Whipple said.

“The ethics policy is not a change in our campaign finance laws,” Whipple said. “That’s a separate ordinance where I think we need to make a change, but it needs to be taken up on its own. But it (the new proposed ordinance) forbids playing favorites based on political donations.”

Whipple said the new ethics policy and ethics commission would cover only the mayor and City Council — not city employees, department heads, police officers or people appointed by Council members to serve on city boards.

“They all have a separate code of ethics that’s enforceable. We don’t, and that’s really what we’re trying to do with this ordinance is restore trust in the elected officials.”

Another topic that likely won’t be addressed is outside employment, Whipple said.

Despite receiving annual salaries approaching $50,000 a year and full health benefits, City Council members are allowed to work full-time positions outside of City Hall.

Whipple said restrictions on outside employment won’t be considered at this time due to objections by City Council members.

Whipple, whose mayoral salary is above $100,000 a year, teaches a class at Wichita State University, a public university that has several financial agreements with the City of Wichita. He said that isn’t a conflict of interest under state law and it shouldn’t be under city law either because it is another government institution that does work in the public interest.

Some of the other members of the council and their spouses work in jobs or positions that could be perceived as conflicts of interest, he said.

“We just need to be careful that we’re working for our constituents and not outside interests when we’re voting,” Whipple said. “It’s a balance, but it can be done.”

Frye is the senior director of investor relations for the Kansas Chamber of Commerce in Topeka, a business advocacy group that lobbies the state legislature and is funded by member fees it charges businesses, including some that do business with the city.

Johnson is vice chair of the Kansas Democratic Party and executive director of Community Operations Recovery Empowerment, 501(c)(3) nonprofit he started in 2011 to focus on community relations between District 1 and the Wichita Police Department. His wife works for Wichita State University and is listed as a board member of Wichita Urban Professionals, Young Professionals of Wichita and the Wichita Park Foundation on Johnson’s latest disclosure form from 2017.

Blubaugh works in real estate for J. Blare, Inc., a company he founded in 2003 and now runs with his wife. The company recently celebrated more than $18.7 million in sales for 2020, according to his social media page.

Many council members sit on multiple boards of directors for organizations that are subsidized by the city, often in non-voting positions.

While the new policy won’t require anyone to their quit their job or step down from board positions, Whipple said it would put in additional safeguards for the city and the council member to make sure public trust is maintained.

Council members are already required by state law to file statements of substantial interest that report outside employment for themselves and their spouses, but only Claycomb and Tuttle have re-submitted each year. Clendenin, on the other hand, only filed on election years, meaning he did not publicly disclose his recent partnerships in two businesses with state Rep. Michael Capps.

Without an enforceable policy, some council members have been proactive in recusing themselves from matters involving their spouses. For instance, Frye and Tuttle have voluntarily recused themselves whenever a vote has come up to award contracts to their spouses’ businesses.

Frye’s wife works for Copp Media, an advertising agency that does business with the city. Tuttle’s husband is the chief operating officer for the Delta Dental, which has a contract to provide dental insurance for city employees.

This story was originally published January 10, 2021 at 5:01 AM.