Chairman: Ethics Board 'being strangled' by budget cuts

What does a regulatory agency do when it relies on the people it regulates for all its funding?

This is the question the Philadelphia Board of Ethics confronts as City Council and Mayor Nutter give it new responsibilities but less money to get the job done.

Richard Glazer, the board's chairman, complained yesterday that his agency is "being strangled" as it attempts to deal with everyday duties such as enforcement, lawsuits and training along with the new task of registering and regulating lobbyists here.

"There is a possibility that we simply will not be able to do the job the administration and Council [have] given us," Glazer said, as his fellow board members listened. "I don't know what else can be done, except keep saying it over and over again, but it is a great concern."

The board's original $1 million annual budget has been trimmed to $810,000 as part of widespread city government budget cuts.

The board asked this year for $130,000 more to staff up for the lobbyist work. Nutter left that out of his budget, and Council did not act on a follow-up request.

This is a tight spot for Nutter, who campaigned as a reformer but confronts shrinking revenues and budget battles with Council year after year.

And Council looks like no ethics ally, with its members railing publicly at times about the attention of board staffers looking into whether members comply with the city's campaign-finance law.

Mark McDonald, Nutter's press secretary, used the phrase "do more with less" three times yesterday while discussing the Board of Ethics budget.

"I think in many ways that is the story of what city government has been doing in the last couple of years," McDonald said. "We've had budget cuts throughout the government. In many cases the budget cuts were larger than what the Board of Ethics has sustained."

McDonald could not cite a city department or agency that has been asked to do significantly more with less funding. He said the Police Department has had to adjust to a "difficult crime environment" with fewer officers on the street.

The Ethics Board can seek relief in court if it makes a case that a budget cut is retaliation by a mayor or Council angry about the way it does its job.

Glazer said that that legal remedy could extend to new duties not being funded by the city.

"However, the kind of proof that would be required to satisfy a court that we literally don't have any resources would be very difficult, in our view," Glazer said. "And that's not the way we would like to go about doing business."

A provision setting the budget as a percentage of the city's budget, as some other cities do with ethics agencies and which Philadelphia does with the Personnel Department and Civil Service Commission, was left out of the legislation that created the board.

Returning to that model would require an amendment to the city charter. Voters in May 2006 approved a charter amendment to create the Board of Ethics.

McDonald said that such a move would "get a fair hearing" if the Board of Ethics pushed for it.

"Down the road, there will be another election cycle," he said. "They will make a request that makes sense to them."