When the idea of a County Ethics Commission was proposed, I thought it was a stupid idea. At that time I was working for Norma Chavez.
The idea was a reaction to all the corruption going on at the time.
Sure it sounds good, but what can a local ethics board do? Make bribery more illegal?
A local ethics board only works for punishing people who play by the rules.
A local ethics board would not have prevented cash from being handed out in the county restroom.
A local ethics board would not have prevented my hero, Willie Gandara, Jr., from distributing Mexico's finest organic pharmaceutical products.
So your local ethics boards end up doing a whole lot of nothing.
That is until speed humps happen.
Why speed humps, and not $20 million lost in a bond sale delay? For the same reason large banks get away with things - Volume. It is easier to punish someone for something small than someone for something big. The small thing only embarrasses a few, the large things embarrasses all.
Speaking of big things, think about ex-Transportation Commissioner Ted Houghton. He pulled a favor for El Paso in getting some $90 million for a streetcar starter kit. How is what he did any different from what Tommy Gonzalez did? Hold on, what Gonzalez did was try to make a school zone safer, whereas Houghton was looking at making certain spots of real estate more valuable.
But the same arguments against Gonzalez can easily made against Houghton. I am almost certain there were other more pressing transportation needs across the state, but those needs be damned. Houghton wanted to bring a trolley so that County Judge Veronica Escobar can say, "Oh, jes, patroncito tank yu."
But it comes down to who is doing the asking and who is doing the taking.
David K wrote about appearances of white guys beating up on the Latino (Tommy Gonzalez).
Some of those doing the beating are genuinely bothered when some like Gonzalez - Hispanic, educated - are not fellow ideological companions....which is kinda racist.
Remember it was Gonzalez who publicly brought up, "Hey, you guys might spending too much around here". Not his exact quote, but close enough. But him sounding a fiscal alarm is what tripped up the Shapleigh crowd. It was already too much that Oscar Leeser won, a man who actually was born in Mexico, and is a self-made millionaire. They could not have another Latino who has done well for himself and never did anything with Cut-and-paste-to-make-reports...err...Community Scholars, and was concerned about the City's financial well-being, running the town.
So they were out for blood.
It just so happens the Shapleigh Crowd got lucky and found their Gavrilo Princip in Jim Tolbert.
And finally the City had an excuse to wipe-off the cobwebs off its ethics board and put it to use.
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