Wichita city officials drop ‘friends’ from ethics proposal, back away from fines

After drafting a new ethics code for more than a year, the Wichita City Council on Tuesday moved to weaken the wording of the existing policy, scrubbing all mention of the word “friends.”

The existing ethics code, which has been in place for 63 years, prohibits City Council members from making decisions involving friends, business associates, customers, clients and competitors. But the council is left to police itself and has not enforced the policy, saying friends was not well defined.

The proposed policy would strengthen other parts of the ethics code. It would limit gifts to $150 a year, create an advisory board to handle complaints against City Council members and city board appointees, establish whistleblower protections, and allow penalties to be handed out for violations.

Unable to agree on a definition of friends, Mayor Brandon Whipple suggested striking the word friends from the ethics ordinance and reviewing the policy in a year to decide if it needs to be changed.

Whipple said striking friends from the ordinance would do away with ambiguity. He said avoiding undue influence is the goal of the policy.

“I want to get back to the problems we seek to address with this,” Wichita Mayor Brandon Whipple said. “And I don’t think friends are a problem.”

The Council debated the ordinance Tuesday during a workshop, which does not allow public comment. But that didn’t stop people from weighing in on the city’s YouTube channel, one means the city has used to gather feedback during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Faith Martin commented: “a body can wordsmith too much ... remember the original objective.”

Chase Billingham, an associate professor of urban sociology at Wichita State who closely monitors city business, commented that the council’s changes Tuesday made no sense.

“The event that motivated the review of the ethics policy was the corrupt relationship between the former mayor and his friends,” he said. “Striking ‘friend’ from the proposed new policy would be pure insanity.”

The city began drafting a new ethics policy after reporting by The Eagle showed how former Mayor Jeff Longwell steered a $500 million water plant contract away from the city staff’s recommended firm and to another group of contractors after they paid for the mayor’s golf outings and meals while the project was open for bidding.

Both Longwell and the contractors agreed they were friends. Under the city’s code of ethics that prohibits voting on contracts involving friends, Longwell shouldn’t have been involved in the decision. Instead, he cast a deciding vote that kept his friends with the Wichita Water Partners in contention for the project.

The other firm, Jacobs Engineering, closed its Wichita office and refused to participate in another selection process after winning the first, leaving Wichita Water Partners as the sole bidder on the largest capital project in the city’s history.

“By removing ‘friends’ from the proposed document, the Council will have gone through months of work, just to end up with an ethics policy that is actually weaker than what they started with,” Billingham said.

Billingham also was critical of the move by the council to relax penalties.

The council backed away from monetary penalties for violations of the ethics code, which would apply to council members and appointees on the city’s various boards and commissions. Instead of a $100 to $1,000 fine for all violations, offenders would more likely undergo ethics training for a first offense or what is deemed a minor offense by the ethics commission. More serious offenses, as determined by the ethics advisory board, would result in a fine.

“The fines are one of the few things in the proposed document that are actually stronger than the current City Council ethics policy,” Billingham said.

Earlier drafts of the ethics policy defined friend as “an individual that has a close connect with an official formed by frequent social interaction.”

Council members weren’t satisfied with the definition because it would leave them open to criticism.

“I think this definition is troublesome,” Council member Cindy Claycomb said. “Because who gets to define frequent? You know, does that mean someone you see every week socially? Every month? Three times a month? You know, I don’t know what that means.”

Council member Bryan Frye suggested Wichita is too small to keep a blanket ban on doing business with friends in the ethics policy.

“That’s the beauty of a town like Wichita: there’s one degree of separation I think all of us have with everybody in town, so that definition of friend is going to be very hard to get to,” Frye said.

“I agree that not everyone who’s a friend has undue influence,” Whipple said. “And not everyone we’re friendly to is a friend, or what we consider a friend.”

Vice Mayor Brandon Johnson offered a substitution.

“Could we potentially — this might be a terrible idea — but maybe strike the term friend and change it to influencer?” Johnson said.

“And then are we going to define influencer,” Claycomb said.

Ultimately, the council decided that definition would be slippery, too.

The City Council is scheduled to vote on the ordinance on May 11.

This story was originally published April 27, 2021 at 2:57 PM.