Survey looks like special treatment

Baker City Council members are not exempt from any of the laws they or their predecessors have approved.

But neither should the city single out councilors for possible enforcement of those laws.

The city’s code enforcement officer recently surveyed councilors’ properties, looking for potential violations of both current ordinances and a proposed maintenance ordinance that councilors are considering.

City residents should be able to feel confident that such is never the case.

City Manager Steve Brocato asked Shannon Regan, the code enforcement officer for the police department, to inspect the seven councilors’ residential and business properties.

Councilors are considering approving a property maintenance ordinance that is more restrictive than the current law.

The idea behind the inspections is to let councilors know, before they decide whether to pass the new ordinance, how it might affect them.

Brocato also sent the results of Regan’s inspections to the Oregon Government Ethics Commission. He asked the state agency for an opinion about whether councilors might have a conflict of interest since they are pondering an ordinance that could affect their pocketbooks and what they do with their property.

We see no evidence that such a conflict exists. According to Oregon statute 244.020(10)(b), council members have no conflict if they’re voting on an ordinance which would affect to the same degree a class consisting of all members of a group — owners of property inside the city, in this case — but that includes no exemptions which might specifically benefit councilors, their relatives or business associates.

A councilor would have a conflict if, for instance, he or she were voting for a tax that was not levied against the type of business the councilor owns.

At any rate, we have no quarrel with Brocato’s stated goal, which is to ensure councilors comply with state ethics laws as they deliberate about the proposed property ordinance. Councilors’ conduct, from an ethical standpoint, must always be beyond reproach.

But we found a couple of serious flaws with how the city went about achieving that goal.

First, the city should not target a specific group of residents — in this case the City Council — even for an informal inspection of the sort Regan conducted.

Second, instead of enlisting the cooperation of councilors in a discussion of how the proposed ordinance affects residents, using councilors’ properties as an example, they were not told that Brocato had ordered the inspections.

Finally, the city compounded those mistakes by making another, more serious one: Brocato didn’t tell Regan to follow through on the results of her inspections of councilors’ properties in the same way she often does with other property owners.

Regan found violations of existing ordinances on properties owned by Councilors Aletha Bonebrake, Dennis Dorrah and Milo Pope. (Regan also noted what would be violations of the proposed property maintenance ordinance on those three councilors’ properties, and on a parcel owned by Councilor Beverly Calder.)

Yet Regan did not cite any of the three councilors for violating ordinances that are in effect now.

The city shouldn’t start the process of enforcing ordinances — as Brocato did by ordering Regan to survey councilors’ properties — but then fail to complete the process as it has done by citing other residents who violated the same ordinances.

We’re not sure, frankly, what the point of this exercise was.

Brocato, in properly striving to treat councilors in what he described as “an egalitarian fashion,” actually showed residents that the city sometimes affords councilors special treatment — both better and worse.

After councilors were targeted for property inspections, some were told they were violating an ordinance. But unlike some of their less fortunate fellow citizens, they weren’t punished for doing so.

It’s too bad Brocato put the councilors, whom he works for, in this situation.